MonsterHunter

Dario Argento’s tale of something or other is the middle film in a loose trilogy including Suspiria and Mother Of Tears. Inferno has been described by some as being one of Dario’s least accessible films. That of course is code for “incoherent.”

This movie was a pretty good-sized Italian brainfart from Dario to you. It starts out in New York City where a woman has this rare book about The Three Mothers. (Somebody should ban those rare books since they almost always cause trouble. It’s probably good that they’re so rare.)

The Three Mothers are apparently some real bad customers who control evil stuff and represent the three Furies or Fates or some such classic crud. The woman reads about these three chicks and they live in three houses. One’s in Rome. I think one is in Germany (the movie was inaccessible so I had a hard time following all the details) and one is in The Big Apple.

This woman (Rose) thinks that her building might be the NYC home of one of the three mommies. There’s a clue you see. There’s this bittersweet smell! That was listed in the book! The rare book guy says, “that’s just the cake factory” and I’m hitting myself in the head going “duh! The cake factory! Of course! What with all the cake factories in New York City, how could I have jumped to conclusions?”

Now Rose isn’t as easily placated as I am (I’ve drunk a few more Keystones in my time than she, after all) so she starts to search the building! Where to start? The basement! Down in the basement she goes and peers around support beams and stuff and then sees a puddle of water. She bends down to look into it and somehow her keys fall off of her waist (What is she? A janitor?) so she puts her hand in the water to get the keys. I must note at this point that calling this a puddle doesn’t exactly do it justice. It is actually a hole filled with water and this hole leads to a giant room that has been flooded.

We can see the keys in the water hanging just out of reach, so she of course manages to graze them just enough to knock them all the way to the bottom. Since she thinks that one of The Three Mothers lives in the vicinity and it’s a long, wet, ways to the bottom to get her keys, she shrugs her shoulders and leaves, figuring she can always use her spare set of keys or get a whole new set, right? Come on! She dives right in!

She swims around and gets the keys and sees that this whole hidden set of rooms has been submerged and then as she’s swimming back up she is attacked by a rotted corpse! Attacked in the sense that it keeps floating near her and bumps into her looking all gross and scary. She makes it out of the pool and runs away. The whole time this was happening, I was just hoping she didn’t store her comic book collection down in the basement like I do!

After this we go to Rome. Why? This is an Italian movie, dummy! Rose writes a letter to her brother Mark. Mark is one of the 70s guys with light colored hair and sissy-looking light colored mustache. He also has a penchant for wearing tight khaki colored dress slacks that make you suspect he probably has a bunch of pictures of bodybuilders hanging up in his one-bedroom apartment at the local Flophouse for Losers in Denial. (Check out Earthquake and pay particular attention to the Marjorie Gortner character.)

Mark gets this letter from his sis and takes it to music class (you see, he’s a music student!) and leaves it laying around on his desk so that the girl next to him (Sarah) finds it. Why didn’t he read it then? How was it that Sarah got hold of it? Well, while listening to music in class, Mark spies this sexy little Italian dish a few rows down and she starts making goo goo eyes at him. Then the winds start blowing her hair around and the windows in the auditorium get blown open and it sounds like a hurricane in there, but nobody notices but Mark. Then class is over and the mysterious beauty is gone. This doesn’t make much sense to me. Maybe this was a trick of The Three Mothers, but it was never alluded to again and accomplished little but damage my teeth as I ground them incessantly.

So Mark leaves in a hormone-induced haze and Sarah sees the letter and says hey, I wonder what Mark’s sis has to got to say and she gives it the old five finger discount. She reads it and it’s about The Three Mothers so she decides to stop off at the Rome Public Library to do some free reading. She gets there and this is a very good library because sitting next to the latest Tom Clancy drivel is three copies of that bestseller from 1589, The Three Mothers. Instead of checking the book out like a normal person, Sarah steals it and leaves through the back door.

It’s like my dear old Granny used to say, “don’t take the back door and tell me it was all a fraternity prank.” She was wise beyond her years, you know. This particular back door leads down some steps and into a bunch of catacombs. The exits aren’t that clearly marked so she wanders smack dab into alchemist lab!

There she sees a person cloaked in black toiling over something like a witch’s brew or maybe goulash. This is either the head librarian or the boogeyman. He sees her with the book and then it is ON! He grabs her and tries to force her head into a vat of steaming green puke. The whole time, I’m screaming, “show him your library card! Just show him your card!”

Finally she drops the book and escapes. She gets home, meets a stranger on an elevator who admires her ripped blouse and she invites him in for a nightcap under the pretext that she was just attacked by a mad alchemist and she just doesn’t feel like being alone. Soon this guy is spewing forth that tired jive about being a sceptic and not believing in the supernatural. After some violence, Mark shows up somehow. Then he gets a call from his sister about The Three Mothers and they get cut off so he heads off to New York City to investigate.

Once in New York, Mark goes to his sister’s apartment and can’t locate her. I might add that there is also some pointless subplot with the rare book seller and a bunch of cats. A good deal of time is spent watching this guy battle all these kitties who keep showing up at his store. He eventually conks one on the head and opens up a chest to reveal a large burlap sack full of really pissed off cats. Then he drags this burlap sack out in the middle of the night through Central Park. This guy is also on crutches so these scenes play out even more slowly than they would otherwise.

He drags this bag out to a lake and tries to dump it in, but that part of the lake is too shallow. Then he goes out deeper and manages to drown all these cats by forcing the bag underwater with one of his crutches. He then falls in the mud and can’t get up. That’s when all these rats start attacking him. I was laughing at him. That’s what you get, jerk! He starts moaning for help and finally the guy running the all-night hotdog stand on the other side of the pond sees this and comes running. When he gets there he takes a knife and cuts the cat-killer’s throat. Guess Oscar Meyer liked cats or something. The scene ends there and no further reference to it is made. Utterly pointless.

Back to Mark, he runs around the building, finds some clues and eventually finds his way to one of the three broads in question. By this point the building is on fire (it’s an Inferno!) started by a burning body falling through a skylight. This woman is cackling and she may even be some character we met before, but all these 70s chicks look alike and I was completely out of it by this time . This chick reveals she is really Death and laughs so Mark runs out of the building and watches it burn up. Wow. Those Three Mothers were really tough. Just burn up their house and run out.

This movie was awful. I still don’t understand what the whole point of it was. What about the other two mothers? What have they been up to all these years? Why bother with the Three Mothers at all? Are things better without them? How? What were their abilities? Were all these murders done at their behest? And if so, why did most of them involve people getting slashed by psycho alchemists or whoever? Style over substance is fine, but you still need a bare minimum of narrative thrust to shepherd things along. Without it, you end up with something as annoyingly confusing as Inferno.

© 2008 MonsterHunter