Italian horrormeister Dario Argento's latest celebration of blood and breasts, Mother of Tears (official site), is out on DVD this week from The Weinstein Company's "Dimension Extreme" label. It's something of a return to form for the venerable old lunatic (I use the term affectionately). After a few films that disappointed some of his fans, Argento has come back to his "Three Mothers" trilogy -- begun in 1977 with Suspiria and continued in 1980 with Inferno -- to wrap up the loosely connected stories about three ancient witches who represent pure evil.

Mother of Tears begins with an old coffin and urn being dug up in an Italian cemetery. The urn contains three statues -- "Look! Three statues!" someone declares, typifying the film's simplistic, lazily translated dialogue -- which soon come to life and murder a museum curator. But since this is an Argento film, the curator isn't just murdered. Her gut is split open, causing her intestines to fall to the floor, whereupon the demons use the intestines to strangle her.

You get what you pay for in an Argento film, and Mother of Tears has all the delightfully gratuitous blood, gore, and nude female bosoms that you could hope for. What about the story? Eh. Argento's daughter, Asia Argento, plays Sarah, an art student investigating the supernatural forces at play, which leads back to those ancient witches, one of whom has been reawakened by the urn's displacement, yada yada. ("She revels in chaos and human despair!" yells a priest, helpfully.) Rome is besieged by violent crimes, suicides, and disturbing murders (a mother throws her baby over a bridge, for example), while Sarah is guided by the spirit of her own mother -- a white witch, it turns out -- who helps her fight evil. Sarah also learns that she can turn herself invisible, which would have been nice to know prior to this crisis, one would think.

What this film lacks, particularly in comparison to the other two entries in the trilogy, is the visual style that used to be Argento's hallmark. He doesn't seem as interested in color as he once was, nor is Mother of Tears anywhere near as visually interesting as, say, Suspiria. Were it not for Argento's name on it (and the general air of competence, I suppose), you'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from the countless straight-to-DVD splatter-fests that you see for sale at horror conventions.

It is fun, though -- garish, silly fun. I can't say I was ever particularly frightened, and I don't think there was any reason for a dialogue-free scene of Sarah walking through a scary house to last three full minutes, but Argento's over-the-top enthusiasm for his art is still very much in evidence. If you like this sort of thing, Argento's your guy.

The film's DVD presentation is adequate. It's "unrated" and includes footage cut from the film's theatrical release. (Did you know it even had a theatrical release?) The picture and Dolby 5.1 sound are pristine. There are no alternate language tracks for the movie, but English and Spanish subtitles are available for the film and the special features. (Argento writes in Italian, and the film was shot in Italy, but the dialogue was recorded in English. You can tell that for many of the actors, English would not have been their first choice.)

In addition to the U.S. trailer and Italian teaser trailer, the DVD boasts a "making of" featurette that's about 30 minutes long and actually focuses less on making the film than on the film's "black carpet" premiere, where the father and daughter Argentos sat on a panel and took questions. There's also an interview with the director, lasting several minutes, in which he quotes German philosopher Martin Heidegger and also gives this sage advice: "People who think it's too gory or too violent, please don't come to see my films because always it will be the same."

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