By Jeffrey M. Anderson
I found it vaguely irresponsible, and perhaps even cruel, that the festival programmed its two most high-profile horror pictures on the same night at around the same time. Dario Argento’s Mother of Tears and Paul Wegener’s 1920 film The Golem both played Friday night between 9 and 11 p.m. I managed to see the Argento film in advance: Mother of Tears is the third in a trilogy that Argento began with Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), but unlike those two this one is laughably awful. Written and performed in stilted English, it’s filled with continuity gaps, logic holes and otherwise unmotivated behavior. But its use of gratuitous nudity, gratuitous gore (much of it actually done with latex rather than CGI!) and gratuitous random acts of cruelty make it a hilarious, MST3K-style cult classic keeper. Not to mention that Asia Argento, though not exactly deserving of an Oscar, manages to inject enough sheer animal presence into the movie to make it worth sticking around.
Mother of Tears is supposed to get a theatrical release in June, while SFIFF’s particular version of The Golem was a one-time deal. The screening boasted a live score by none other than Black Francis (once again going by his Pixies-era moniker, rather than Frank Black or Charles Thompson). The good news is that it was a great Black Francis show, but the bad news is that I’m not sure the songs actually synced up with or enhanced the movie in any way. For the most part they actually rubbed up against the movie, competed with it for our attention. In 2005, American Music Club’s score for Frank Borzage’s Street Angel (1927), was pure genius, absolutely mesmerizing. Francis’ The Golem played a bit more like syncing up Pink Floyd to The Wizard of Oz (1939); sometimes something magical happened, melding music and film, but other times, you were trapped in some netherworld between the two forms.