La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother)

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La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother)

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La Terza Madre (Mother of Tear...

Adam James, Araba Dell'Utri, Asia Argento, Clive Riche, Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni

An ancient urn chained to a coffin is unearthed by chance by some men at work along the road bordering the Viterbo’s cemetery. The urn contains an age-old tunic and some objects belonging to Mater Lac...( read more  read more... )rimarum, the Third Mother (Moran Atias). The only survivor of the Three Mothers - three powerful witches who had been shedding blood and terror for aeons - Mater Lacrimarum (the Mother of Tears) has been hiding in Rome for centuries and her awakening triggers a chain of mysterious and terrible events: the Evil is back to cast its dark shadow over the city.

Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento), a young student of restoration, co-worker and love interest of Michael Pierce (Adam James), the curator of the Museum of Ancient Art of Rome, is involved in the escalating and increasingly frantic episodes of violence. Sarah tries to run away but she cannot: the Third Mother is looking for her and Sarah is not aware of the fact that her mother Elisa Mandy (Daria Nicolodi) was a powerful white witch brutally killed by Mater Suspiriorum, the witch from Fryeburg.
Helped by the spirit of her mother, by an eminent esoterism academic, Guglielmo De Witt (Philippe Leroy), and by the Chief Constable Marchi (Cristian Solimeno), Sarah realizes that she has no way out and that she must face the impending threat...

Id: 10916006

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La Terza Madre (Mother of Tears: The Third Mother) Recent Reviews
  • harrycaul
    November 26, 2009
    harrycaul
    Although Suspiria and Inferno were essentially good-versus-evil fairy-tales, Dario Argento was wise enough back then to keep religion out of them. All that portentous mummery invariably just slows things down, turning a potential white-knuckle rollercoaster ride int...( read more)o a dreary ghost-train through Sunday-school.

    The opening of La Terza Madre feels more like a sequel to (Argento protégé) Michele Soavi's The Church than the eagerly anticipated final chapter of the Three Mothers trilogy. Despite being more conventionally plotted than either of its predecessors, what follows sadly amounts to nothing more than a badly connected series of set-pieces, a tediously repetitive cycle in which one esoteric scholar after another is gruesomely dispatched after first being pumped for information by Asia Argento. As for the death scenes, apart from the first - in which the victim is disembowelled then strangled with her own intestines(!) - they are bloody but uninspired: a lethargic Argento giving the people what he thinks they want. His portrayal of Rome succumbing to anarchy and violence as evil spreads across the land is woefully inept.

    The look of the film is disappointingly realistic after the heavy stylisation of both Suspiria and Inferno, so it is unsurprising that it fails to recapture their dreamy, fairy-tale ambience. La Terza Madre was touted as a return to Argento's classic era of film-making, which was an optimistic way of saying it's a hotchpotch of bits and pieces cribbed from his best movies: Suspiria, Inferno, Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera. The casting of his onetime muse was inevitable, but Daria Nicolodi's geriatric fairy godmother would still be unintentionally hilarious if the CGI effects used to create her weren't crap. I could go on and on... It breaks my heart to say so but this film is awful, at least as bad as Argento's dismal Phantom of the Opera. I'd like to think he still has another great movie in him but, surely, this should have been it :(
  • stopitgoaway
    June 2, 2009
    stopitgoaway
    Being such a big fan of Argento, I went into this film with a mixture of massive anticipation and worry that it might not live up to my expectations. With the exception of Sleepless, Argento hasn't made a really great film since Opera in 1987, and while I wouldn't quite call the ...( read more)final instalment of the 'Three Mothers' series a return to form, it's certainly a lot better than the majority of his modern movies. The thing that really made the first two films in this series standout was the colourful sets and fairytale atmosphere, and unfortunately this film features neither. I have no idea if Argento decided to discard these things in favour of a modern setting or if it was the producers who were worried that a seventies style film wouldn't sell, but either way; it doesn't feature here and that's the thing I liked least about this film. The film is slightly more story-heavy than the two previous entries and this time we have more of a clearly defined point. The story is set in Rome and our central character is Sarah Mandy. The film kicks off with the discovery of an ancient urn, and from there strange things start happening. Rape, assault and arson increases and strange people start to gather in Rome. These events are due to the return of Mater Lacrimarum, the most beautiful of the three witches at the heart of this series. It soon becomes apparent that the only person who can stop the evil from enveloping the world is Sarah Mandy, who has a few supernatural powers of her own...

    As mentioned, it's the change in style that is the biggest problem with this film for me and the thing that really means it doesn't quite live up to the previous two instalments, but what the film lacks in atmosphere, Argento makes up for in gore (and then some) and it's clear that the great director has lost none of his eye for a brutal and stylish death scene. This film is far gorier than the sum of the gore scenes in both of the previous films, and it's great to see a modern film that doesn't hold back. The gore scenes range from quick to stylised and drawn out but all are very gory - with one notable exception which also happens to be the most shocking sequence in the film! Argento has donned the use of CGI and it's a bit of a shame because it looks rather cheap - but that's only a problem really in one scene. Argento films are not known for fluent plots and great acting, and there's a very good reason for that. This film has more than just a few holes and the acting is not anything to write home about either. As is the case with a lot of his modern films, Argento has cast his daughter, Asia Argento in the lead role. She's beautiful and not a bad actress - but Argento always makes her roles too 'clean', and it doesn't suit her considering the Hellraiser she is in real life! I also didn't like the supernatural subplot with her character; it's just sort of thrown in there and doesn't work very well. Argento makes more of an attempt to establish his mythology with this film than in the previous two and he even makes nods to the first two, though I think more could be made of this aspect of the series. The ending is abrupt but nicely done if you ask me. Overall, I did like The Third Mother a lot - it's only disappointing when compared to the other two films. In its own right; this is a great gory Italian horror flick and definitely comes recommended.
  • Stinger839
    March 7, 2009
    Stinger839
    NOTE: please read my Suspiria review if what I say here inflames you. On second screening, I GOT the genius of Suspiria, but out of respect to my former self (and other viewers) who was able to view the film as "pretentious" and to also make my point about what modern horror shou...( read more)ld be, I leave those defaming comments on Suspiria intact.

    The murder ataboutaround 10minutes in is AMAZING. Goretastic like one craves and with a great use of guts. And they just keep getting gorier and more creative. From Udo Kier's priest character to the medium's girlfriend, this is full of crazy kills.

    And the antagonists - the demonic forces, followers, and possessed people are just damn scary with a cool edge. From the ancient language speaking ravers to a fully fleshed pointy eared demon, the design is well done and the result is some very unique characters. The monkey is probably the coolest though.

    The acting is over the top melodramatic to say the least, but that didn't matter much to me when the version I'm watching has French audio and English subtitles. People complain that the story moves around too much, thus lack of atmosphere (am I the only one that equates "atmosphere" to a more static setting and slower pace with fewer plot details), but I think that a fast film overloaded with details fits this horror subgenre of end of the world sorcery battle much better. I'm a sucker for Catholic mythology, and unless you're going to do it perfectly as in The Exorcist, the "atmospheric" approach should be avoided.

    This is an action thriller horror movie, and not an atmospheric psychological-subjective horror like Susperia. I haven't seen Inferno yet, and I didn't really see what was so damn great about Suspiria on my first two views, so now I'm going to go back and see that again and Inferno the first time because I really like the story. As a horror movie, this has no "atmosphere" because it has a fast pace instead. But fuck atmosphere; that's not what modern horror needs. This is what modern horror needs - absurd kills and insane amounts of violence and a heavily loaded plot. Not some minimalistic over-lit underwritten character piece with not nearly enough blood like Suspiria. This movie piles it on, and I like it like that. Suspiria is slow and overimportant, read too pretentious for its own good; this is fast and rude, read made for the blood-addicted ADD generation. I prefer the latter style for this millennium and leave the former style to actual masters of it like David Lynch.

    My only complaint is that the ending isn't so much a showdown as it is a letdown. I expected a full on witch fight or at least a more hyped scene, and instead the main character just gets lucky without having to struggle for it.
  • organgrinder136
    December 18, 2008
    organgrinder136
    classic argento. eg. show some tit to cover up a completely rubbish film. a true example of style over substance
  • vierasesine
    December 13, 2008
    vierasesine
    Why did the witches have such difficulties applying their make-up?
  • FilmFanatik
    December 21, 2009
    FilmFanatik
    What a disturbing pile of ****. I was so disappointed.
  • Hellshocked
    December 14, 2009
    Hellshocked
    Completely devoid of atmosphere, class, stylishness and any semblance of direction, "La Terza Madre" is a tremendous disappointment and perhaps the final nail in the coffin of what has become Dario Argento's career. His outpůt over the last decade had been of systematically decr...( read more)easing quality, but the hope always remained that going back to his roots would breathe new life into his art. After this, however, there are no two ways about it: the man truly has lost it. That the film was either shot or (for some incomprehensible reason) transferred to digital should tell you all you need to know about just how far he has fallen.

    Much like the work of his contemporary, Lucio Fulci, "La Terza Madre" is nothing but an excuse to pile on the gore. The film goes completely out of its way (and much to the detriment of its already troublesome pacing and what little mood it had reluctantly managed to generate) to focus on the violence. The first kill,: poorly edited, amateurishly staged and drawn out beyond comprehension, is enough to reveal where the film's priorities lie: blood and guts uber alles. Throw in an insurmnountable ammount of expository dialogue (a necessity, perhaps, due to budgetary restraints but no more the pleasant for it), putrid acting (Dario Argento tends to bring out the worst in his daughter) and a point-and-shoot directorial approach that any hack with a camera could have duplicated and you are left with a lifeless mass cobbled together seemingly at random by people with nary a clue as to what they were doing or, more importantly, why.

    The horror frat boys (as exemplified by Eli Roth, their idol and patron saint) will no doubt love the film, laughing and hollering their way through it and that is perhaps the saddest thing of all. If this film is any indication then Argento has become everything he was always unfairly accused of being, a parody of what he actually was, a one note running joke. Forget style over substance: his trilogy capper is gore AS style AS substance, and all the cameos in the world from former collaborators can't save it from itself.
  • gabykacheek
    December 6, 2009
    gabykacheek
    UNA VEZ MÁS SE LA RIFO... EN ESPERA DE VER GIALLO!! LA ESCENA DEL BABY UFF FUCKIN POSEIDOS... BRUJAS... NICE NICE
  • rabidwombat22
    October 16, 2009
    rabidwombat22
    Quite stupid and fake.
  • killerkittyclothing
    October 15, 2009
    killerkittyclothing
    I love Asia but her acting was terrible in this movie. Nothng about this movie screamed Argento to me. It was boring and cheap looking.
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