Ostensibly this completes Dario Argento’s witchy trilogy initiated with Suspiria and Inferno, or in other words the trilogy suspended more than a quarter-century earlier. The central storyline, which can stand or fall on its own, concerns the unearthing of an antique urn in a church graveyard, the unleashing thereby of the most powerful witch in the world, the rallying of an army of lesser witches (more like a convention of saucy punk rockers), and the touching-off of random violence in the streets, heralding the Second Fall of Rome. The treatment is unabashedly schlocky, the dialogue ticklingly lame (“Hey, there’s something down here,” and “I just can’t get my head around it,” and “There’s more to this case than we think,” and, maybe the best laugh, “I’m only a psychic. I can communicate with spirits, but that’s about it”), and the intervals between nauseating bloodbaths thankfully long. Yet the whole thing seems stunted, stuck, unadventurous — and aside from an extreme closeup of a scalpel slicing through the wax seal of the urn, it misses the fetishistic tactility that so grabbed the eye in Argento’s early days. In the final analysis, it comes across as not so much a blast from the past as a last gasp. Granted, not all filmmakers can grow like Clint Eastwood, but some of them do at least manage to get out of adolescence. Featuring Asia Argento (the director’s daughter, a relationship that didn’t stand in the way of a nude shower scene), Cristiano Solimeno, Philippe Leroy, Udo Kier, and Daria Nicolodi (the star’s mother, playing her mother on screen as well, with undoctored baby photos for documentation). (2007) — Duncan Shepherd
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