Italian director Dario Argento is revered by hard-core horror fans for his gothic, over-the-top thrillers, but even the patience of his most devoted followers will be sorely tested by "Mother of Tears: The Third Mother." The final installment of a trilogy Argento began in 1977 with "Suspiria," this lurid celebration of shock, schlock and the shamelessly perverse finds the 67-year-old grandfather of torture porn scraping the bottom of his admittedly limited creative barrel.

Argento's daughter, Asia, stars as an art historian named Sarah who is working at a museum in Rome when a mysterious urn arrives at her office. After a colleague is brutally murdered, Sarah is soon on the run, escaping from a black witch and her fashionista followers. Hewing to the exposition-exposition-whammy narrative structure, "Mother of Tears" is a pretentiously cheese-ball affair, designed simply to up the gross-out ante with each succeeding denigration of flesh. Unlike his colleague Stuart Gordon (see review of "Stuck"), Argento isn't content with only one eye-gouging; a proud graduate of the Luis Bu?uel School of Optometry, he's firmly of the more-is-more persuasion when it comes to graphic violence.

He reserves a special place of depravity for violence against women, who are symbolically raped and ravaged throughout "Mother of Tears" (a regrettably familiar Argento trope). The final indignity, after the film's Grand Guignol of a finale, is almost drowning his daughter in a river of raw sewage and decomposing corpses. Something this hateful doesn't even deserve to be called camp.

-- Ann Hornaday (June 6, 2008)

Contains graphic violence, nudity, disturbing images, blood, gore and terror.