Mother of Tears. After making a splash at festivals in ’07, Dario Argento’s conclusion to the “Three Mothers” trilogy had a modest theatrical run earlier this year, at which time it was greeted by many positive reviews—which frankly mystifies me. Were these consolation prizes from the mainstream for years of neglect, or encouraging bouquets from the horror community intended to keep the aging maestro in the saddle? In any case, it’s hard to imagine what specifically could prompt a positive reaction to this film, which is really a silly stringing together of shock scenes that don’t really shock. You never expect a lot of rationality from an Argento film, but you expect the lack of logic to be obscured by a memorable tone of madness and unpredictably and, in his best films, an operatic sense of transcendent horror. But in Mother of Tears the gore seems to be purely for the audience’s benefit—and in the end that’s of course always the case, but the trick is to hide this a bit or else come across as a hack. That is, you can’t tell why the evil characters themselves are so sadistic in this film (unless they’re gore fans, too), with the result that the randomness gets perceived as creative laziness instead. Sure, a scene in which a baby is thrown off a bridge made me sit up and take notice, but as the movie progressed I had the feeling that this and similar ideas were simply leftovers from Argento’s mental notebooks of the past four decades that he finally decided to make public

Perhaps Argento’s biggest sin here, though, is the way he takes his daughter Asia—arguably a world-class star or world-class film actor, or both—and regresses her 15-20 years back to the start of her career. The result is that she delivers a by-the-numbers performance that largely consists of running and screaming, and, alternately, screaming and running. If it weren’t so pathetic, the appearance of her real-life mother in dead-Jedi mode as her screen mother would be heart-warming. Instead it’s one more fatal miscalculation. As far as the DVD extras are concerned, skip the featurette with its puzzling interviews with random moviegoers attesting to Agento’s genius. You’ll get more insight from the much briefer interview with Argento himself. So while I’m sure it was a good strategic move to pick up Romero and Argento’s latest for U.S. distribution, someone should inform The Weinstein Company that it might want to invest in discovering the next generation of all-time masters who are no doubt out there struggling for recognition. September 23

Strange Behavior. Released five years before 1986’s BLUE VELVET and two decades before DONNIE DARKO, Strange Behavior prefigures their unpredictable takes on small-town weirdness but does so clearly on its own terms. With a minimalist soundtrack by Tangerine Dream that evokes dread from the first note on, and an effectively deadpan approach overall, Michael Laughlin’s film is disarming in the extreme, in some ways even unforgettable. Co-written and produced by Bill Condon, who went on to make GODS AND MONSTERS, Strange Behavior starts like a slasher movie and then slyly shifts into much more idiosyncratic territory. To its credit, it never comes across as self-indulgent and some of the set pieces, including a knife attack on a couple in a car and the infectious musical number (!) that precedes it, are bonafide show-stoppers. Trying not to be an oddball exploitation flick—the topflight cast, which includes Louise Fletcher and Michael Murphy, always plays things straight—nor taking the kind of twee-yet-bizarre tack to its subject matter we might see nowadays, Strange Behavior stands as a one-of-a-kind tour de force. That subject matter, by the way, concerns a nefarious psych lab that’s heavy into operant conditioning involving the residents of a nearby college town.

A cohesive amalgam of family drama, police procedural, teen flick, science fiction, American gothic, and out-and-out horror, Strange Behavior has a flavor that’s worth experiencing for its own sake. Laughlin intelligently frames things as “squarely” (in both senses of the term) as possible so that the inherent strangeness stands out more sharply in relief. Despite the occasional expert tracking shot reminiscent of early Argento or Carpenter, he constructs scenes wherever possible around static, eye-level, symmetrically-composed master shots that are held for long takes. The effect is disconcerting, like being in the audience for a sitcom taping except that someone forgot to add the jokes. Synapse’s welcome DVD release includes the original trailer, extensive filmographies, and even a couple of deleted scenes it has somehow managed to exhume. October 28

No Man’s Land. At first No Man’s Land struck me as possibly this year’s BORDERLAND, meaning that its many accomplishments would be overshadowed by vaguely similar releases. But then it soon dawned on me that No Man’s Land, unpromisingly subtitled “The Rise of Reeker,” was far more earnest than the earlier film… and then I made the mistake of thinking that this earnestness would translate into its being boringly straightforward. But no, say what you will of this film—dismiss its narrative core as gimmicky—but its odd, and mostly effective, commitment to a truly original premise sets it far apart from so many other titles it may end up getting lumped with in terms of critical and fan response. Even in the context of this hardly exhaustive round-up, there are two other films, BREATHING ROOM and DARK FLOORS, that take strangers of disparate backgrounds, stick them in a disorienting yet cruel pressure cooker, and then proceed to turn up the heat.

But where those films only rub up against notions of narrative and conceptual self-discipline in fits and starts, No Man’s Land guides viewers through its twisty backroads without cheats and while always remaining “in the moment” as it considers its audience’s needs; that is, the action-horror sequences work as stand-alones, but then gain extra dimension when things really come together at the climax.

Yes, the cruelty and violence may seem ultra-random at times—even when harrowing and well-executed—but rest assured that in the final minutes, all will be explained. Who’s “Reeker” you asked? Well, he’s some dead guy who’s still terrorizing remote desert travelers. But how is he able to pull victims into the clichéd filling station/greasy spoon rest stop when they are miles and miles from this setting, and then keep them there through some kind of science-fiction force field? You may figure out some of the answers along the way, but the good news is that writer-director Dave Payne keeps the surface story just engaging enough that your mind doesn’t have time to focus on the deeper stuff. I’m not suggesting that No Man’s Land is flawless, let alone a work of genius—there’s too much garden-variety “relationship” dialogue between ex’s and between a father and son—but as surrealist, perhaps even mythological, horror goes, this is a film not simply to be sampled, but savored. I’ve never seen Payne’s earlier REEKER film, which this serves as a prequel to and with which it apparently shares similar plot points, but now I’m anxious to check it out. October 14

Dark Forces. Fascinating, puzzling, and oddly compelling—where is Synapse unearthing all these overlooked little gems? Like THIRST (see page 6), Dark Forces hails from Australia’s Golden Age of genre experimentation in the late 70’s and early 80’s. Also like THIRST, it stars David Hemmings. Here he plays an up and coming senator being groomed by kingmaker Broderick Crawford of ALL THE KING’S MEN fame. The only problem is Robert Powell’s magician character, who has apparently faith-healed Hemmings’s son from leukemia, thus earning him a spot in his wife’s good graces (among other things). How to deal with the pesky charlatan—if that is indeed what he is? If you can stomach the occasional detours into domestic melodrama (“You’re as ineffectual in government as you are in bed!”) and the somewhat anticlimactic ending, then you’ll probably enjoy this decidedly offbeat treat. Indeed, at times the tone is so strangely ambiguous as to be mood-altering, which lends Dark Forces a more grown-up, literate feel than it perhaps strictly deserves. What I loved about the film is that it actually taught me a new way of looking at magic. Previously I had thought about the topic in only either/or terms: either magic is illusion or it is “real” in the HARRY POTTER vein of actually being able to manipulate laws of reality. Dark Forces muddies any such clear-cut distinction of this sort, and does so in a contemplative way, asking what if it took years of training to master certain real psychological and metaphysical practices in order to produces illusions on a vast scale? Still, Dark Forces is only arguably a horror film, and even there it’s true only in the ominous atmosphere of certain sequences (very little transpires that is actually of a horrifying nature). That’s not a bad thing, to instead be a dark fantasy fused with a ‘70s-style paranoid political thriller—in fact, the artful blending of those genres may be the film’s chief virtue. October 28

Brotherhood of Blood. It’s not a good sign when a vampire movie opens up with two consecutive talky scenes, and sure enough in this case that’s a harbinger of things to come: Brotherhood of Blood is so far off-base in its notions of what either horror audiences generally or vampire fans specifically want out of a movie that at times it’s almost painful to sit through. And that’s too bad because at the core of the movie are some potentially intriguing ideas. For example, following a tight-knit band of contemporary vampire hunters who operate a bit like the outfit in DOG, THE BOUNTY HUNTER might be an interesting premise as long as the resultant film didn’t take itself so seriously. Unfortunately, the low-rent characters here—both vampires and hunters—seem to drag the entire enterprise down into a series of cramped, poorly-lit rat’s nests from which the movie can’t really recover: it just hurts the eyes to look at for more than a minute or two. As one of the vampires, Sid Haig gooses Brotherhood of Blood for short spells, but of course both the conviction and the fun that he brings to the party only makes everything else suffer in comparison; it’s as if he’s wandered in from, well, a Sid Haig movie. As another vampire, the always-likable Ken Foree hams it up to mixed results. The rest of the bloodsuckers, however, are about as intimidating as a gang of bouncers at a beatnik coffee house, and the hunters have apparently had all the charisma drained out of them long ago. I can enjoy low-budget “mythological” treatments of vampires as much as the next guy. However, in those cases the ideas have to be the selling point (as in SUNDOWN, or even THIRST). Yet the kind of “ideas” this movie floats consists of things like torturing a vampire by pulling his fangs out. If that sounds like something you couldn’t have thought up on your own, then there’s a slim chance you might enjoy the heavy-handed and humorless goings-on in Brotherhood of Blood. October 14