Celluloid Confetti

I love George Romero and Dario Argento. Together, their work represented some of the best of what pure horror could achieve if it put its mind to it.

Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and its sequels were smart, satirical slow-burning frighteners, suggesting that mankind was doomed long before the dead took to their feet and started to lurch.

Argento’s films were technically brilliant and morally corrupt, like Hitchcock on crack. His peculiar brand of mad-axe misogyny is redeemed only for the fact that, like Hitchcock, he gave his actresses all the best roles.

Well, the pair are back with two new releases: Romero with Diary of the Dead, the fifth in his series of Dead films, and Argento with The Mother of Tears, the concluding part of his Three Mothers Trilogy, which began with Suspiria and Inferno.

I would never have wanted to have to choose between Romero and Argento, but recent events have forced my hand.

Diary of the Dead is a bold departure for Romero, ‘resetting’ the storyline by relocating the zombie uprising to the present day. Bolder still, the entire film is told using ‘found footage’ - yes, the Blair Witch Project shakey-cam is back! - shot by a troupe of film studies students.

The first point Romero is trying to make is that, in the age of Fox News, when disaster strikes, the truth will be revealed to us by a plucky army of YouTubers and cameraphone-wielding bloggers.

Romero’s second point is that the MySpace generation’s obsession with documenting every aspect of their lives dehumanises the way we relate to one another, making us no better than…. zombies?

Unfortunately, these two points are hammered home with about as much subtlety as a baseball bat to the braiiiin.

For some reason, Romero thought it would be a good idea to have the entire film narrated by a character who is a film studies student, who explains, as film studies students are wont to do, each and every one of the points the film is trying to make as and when they happen.

To make matters worse, two thirds of the film are set aboard a winnebago.

The result is excruciating, and other than a smattering of brilliantly conceived zombie deaths (one involving a deaf/mute Amish, another featuring a jar of acid), Diary of the Dead is only worth pencilling in for curiosity value.

Romero deserves credit for trying something new, but with forced dialogue and an unlikeable cast of characters who make Cloverfield’s protagonists look like Aung San Suu Kyii, he needn’t have bothered.

By contrast, The Mother of Tears takes all Argento’s old indulgences, gives them a new lick of paint, and sends them out into the world as if the last thirty years hadn’t happened.

When a mysterious urn is unearthed, a powerful witch is re-awakened and spreads chaos and murder throughout Rome, and a young woman must discover her latent powers to confront this ancient, bare-tittied evil.

Needless to say, lesbians are mutilated, skulls are crushed, and - in the film’s opening murder - an unfortunate individual is throttled with their own intestines.

Oddly, the visual bombast of Suspiria and Inferno is absent - stylistically, Mother of Tears is far closer to giallo detective thrillers such as Tenebrae or Profundo Rosso, complete with sardonic cops and a fish-out-of-water Englishman.

Touchingly, Mother of Tears is evidently something of a family affair: Argento’s daughter, Asia stars as our plucky heroine, and her mother (Argento’s regular leading lady, Daria Nicolodi) makes a cameo appearance as… her mother.

Okay, so the film itself is utter nonsense, but unlike Diary of the Dead, it left me entertained, flecked with small droplets of spit, and craving more.

Comparing the two films side-by-side, I came to a sudden realisation: Romero has inspired so many successful films, we don’t really need him anymore.

If you need a zombie fix, there is plenty to choose from: the unexpectedly non-terrible Dawn of the Dead remake and the 28 Days/Weeks later films, to mainstream stuff like I am Legend and Shaun of the Dead.

By contrast, Argento has inspired no-one outside of a lunatic asylum, and if he wasn’t still making his kind of films, nobody else would.

So if you are feeling nostalgic and you fancy a fright, I’d pick The Mother of Tears everytime.