1. Unholy howler monkey!
2. The first murder victim delivers hilarious faux-archaeologist lines. She resembles Christopher Guest stalwart Catherine O’ Hara.
3. The dark circles under Asia Argento’s eyes and the scour-rough warm wool of her voice. She’s a star.
4. This time, Dario Argento’s trademark homicidal attack on a character’s eyes is a steel version of the nyuk nyuk nyuk treatment that Moe used to give Curly.
5. Daria Nicolodi’s character looks like a video game avatar. Plus, her appearance and her role create an entire other story that surrounds the story onscreen: one in which Asia, her child by Dario, saves the world from occult apocalypse (but dutifully showers before her daddy’s camera and dives into a putrescent soup of corpses first).
6. Best baby-killing scene since Andy Warhol’s Bad (1977).
7. Asia has to fend off Eurotrashy new wave cackling witches, Japanese Goth cackling witches, and International Male–model cackling witches — all of which love public transit.
8. Instead of a Helena Marcos–like Suspiria crone, the lead villain is an underdressed nymphet. Someone I saw the movie with deemed her "Boob Lady."
9. It delivers more gruesome guts and gore than every mechanical Hollywood horror remake of the past 10 years put together. If you walk into the theater in a state of frustration, you will leave it in a state of blood-sated jubilation.
10. It’s the third part of the Three Mothers trilogy, fool!
MOTHER OF TEARS
Opens Fri/20 at Bay Area theaters