Dario Argento Gives Us One Ugly Mother

Telepathic lesbian vamps. A vicious screaming monkey. Shock cuts to bugged-out eyeballs. Udo Kier as an exorcist with a bad case of the shakes. These are a few of my favorite things in "The Mother of Tears," a brain-blasting flashback to the anarchic delirium of 1970s Italian horror, and a bit of an autumnal encore by its master, 67-year-old director Dario Argento.

Almost nothing in this gore-drenched sprawl makes any sense, from the ludicrously flat dialogue to the dumb things people do when ancient demonic forces stalk their mortal souls. But that only adds to the vertiginous fun. Thirty years after "Suspiria," "Mother of Tears," which opens in the city Friday, completes Mr. Argento's "Three Mothers" series with a tale about the last of the mythic trio of witches who have shadowed every calamity in human history. This deathless Jezebel, known as Mater Lachrymarum, or Mother of Tears, has been dormant in Rome for hundreds of years, and is suddenly awakened by the recovery of a mysterious urn from a grave that is being excavated.

The object, adorned with forbidding glyphs of a Satanic nature, is shipped off to the Museum of Ancient Art in Rome, where a lovely young intern named Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento, stepping back into her recurring role as her father's masochistic heroine) witnesses its unsealing. She takes a quick break and returns to find her colleague being greedily disemboweled by three gnarly demons. Hoping to avoid the same fate, Sarah tries to hide, but is spied by the demons' accomplice: a freaky, noisy monkey. Out of nowhere, a voice speaks to Sarah, and an exit door that was locked magically opens. And the race is on.

Haunted by the deaths of her parents, Sarah will eventually discover the source of that voice — and reunite with her mother (Daria Nicolodi, Ms. Argento's real-life mom), whom she learns is a White Witch murdered at the hands of the Mother of Tears. Now the same forces of darkness are after Sarah, who scampers through Rome as it veers into an apocalypse out of a Hieronymus Bosch tableau — babies hurled from bridges, random shootings, stabbings, rapes, arson, and looting. The Mother of Tears is back, and all her witches and ghouls are jetting into Rome for a big party. Sarah has to dodge a coven of punk-goth witches out to kill her, using her secret powers and eyeball-gouging techniques. In keeping with the hoot factor that defines the film, the twisted sisters look about as menacing as the contestants from "America's Top Model" playing trick or treat.

As Sarah puts the pieces together and follows her crooked path to a climactic encounter with the Mother of Tears (who turns out to be something of a bisexual dominatrix), she avoids some of the more horrific fates that befall her co-stars. This being an Argento film, there is much fascination with amateur optometry. Evil henchmen torture victims with medieval devices that hammer out teeth and excavate eye sockets. And Sarah herself is drugged and interrogated with the aid of a surgical tool that props her eyelids open. Though she seems just as dazed as lesser mortals, including an archaeologist boyfriend (he freaks out, and Sarah burns him alive in his apartment), Sarah somehow stumbles her way to the rotting mansion of destiny with all her parts intact.

"The Mother of Tears" is such a kaleidoscopic collision of genius and absurdity that even fans who know better will be compelled to suspend their usual good sense. Mr. Argento, who co-wrote the English-language screenplay, might as well have shot the film in 1977. The same stalker-like camera movements and sublimely odd electronic scoring (by Claudio Simonetti, who makes everything sound like a bad acid trip) abide, as do the fabulously bad acting-in-a-second-language and gratuitously lurid sexual interludes. Hallelujah. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.