Philadelphia Weekly

Stuck
Directed by Stuart Gordon
B
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., June 6

In 2001 Ft. Worth, Texas, resident Chante Mallard struck a homeless man with her car and, rather than call 911, let him stay embedded in her windshield, where he eventually bled to death. Already a subject for both CSI and Law & Order, this too-true tale of moral vacuity and otherworldly stupidity now finds itself stretched to feature length in Stuck, a rock solid indie from Stuart Gordon.

Gordon's best thought of for Re-Animator, as well as other gory H.P. Lovecraft takes. Little known, though, is that the guy responsible for a decapitated head performing cunnilingus is also a lifelong devotee of the theater, and whose last (underseen) film was a star-studded adaptation of David Mamet's play Edmond.

Gordon brings both sides of his career to Stuck, his second non-horror in a row, which benefits from both his way with actors in close quarters and not being above cutting to close-ups of a windshield wiper nestled deep within a guy's open wound.

Very loosely based on the Mallard incident, Stuck stars a cornrows-wielding Mena Suvari as a nurse who doesn't mind taking special care of an elderly patient whose specialty is shitting the bed. Her capacity for responsibility and compassion thus established, she then celebrates a forthcoming promotion by drunkenly plowing into then imprisoning Stephen Rea, a down-on-his-luck sadsack recently homeless.

Real life and Stuck's version of events soon part ways. Mallard, who tried disposing of the body, is now serving a 50-year sentence. Gordon and screenwriter John Strysick take things in a pulpier, goofier direction, milking it for caught-in-the-throat yuks and corrosive satire on what it takes to get by in America.

Rea's internment is extended by increasingly boisterous methods (read: a showstopping catfight), and yet Gordon doesn't let things get too out of hand, always keeping his lead actors believable even when the situations aren't particularly. In a sense, Rea gets to play the audience surrogate, eternally flabbergasted at the surreal situation he's found himself in. (An undervalued comic thesp, his exclamation of "What the fuck is wrong with you?" ought to bring down the house.)

Suvari, unexpectedly, is his equal, radiating a sincere sense of panic that makes her subhuman decisions almost understandable. Even when she turns to the man simply trying to escape and asks, in all sincerity, "Why are you doing this to me?" Suvari makes a twisted, self-delusional kind of sense.

As actress, filmmaker, tattoo addict and world-class exhibitionist Asia Argento's star has risen, it seemed inevitable that one day Daddy would stage his comeback. Italian horror and 'giallo master Dario--who with 1993's Trauma gave his daughter her very first nude scene as a 16th birthday present--lost most of the world's attention somewhere around 1987's Opera.

Since then he's hardly been out of work. Yet Mother of Tears, his first film with Asia in the lead since she began associating with the likes of Vin Diesel and sham memoirist J.T. LeRoy, still feels like a bald-faced attention-grabber, even if most of the attention it's received has been, well, not exactly kind.

A three-ring craptacular that wouldn't be a fraction as entertaining if everyone involved weren't treating it with dead seriousness, Mother of Tears stars an understandably confused-looking Asia as one of those hot movie art restorers who opens a recently excavated urn. Out come blinky-eyed zombies to gorily do in her friend, followed in quick succession by evil monkeys, psychic lesbians, obnoxious marauding chicks, goth baddies, squished heads, kids hurled off bridges, ghosts rendered in terrible CGI, blood orgies, Udo Kier and any other extravagance her father can summon up.

Mother of Tears purports to belatedly close out one of the loosest and least-thought-through trilogies in film history. Starting with his brilliant 1977 eyesore Suspiria and continuing with 1980's nasty Inferno, Argento the elder has sought to spin a mythology involving three witches whose power has untold apocalyptic effect. But as far as continuing a story, Mother of Tears has more in common with a cash-in sequel along the lines of The Prophecy 3: The Ascent or whatever Saw entry we're up to.

Not that it matters, not when Dario's chief m.o. appears to be to pile insanity upon insanity until the fool thing is far past teetering. Dario Argento has never been one to let logic, even a film's very own built-in kind, get in the way of a decent bit of gore or a bravura set piece, and Mother of Tears has a certain go-for-broke inanity that's hugely stupid but also hugely endearing.

Throughout it all, even when being forced to literally (and metaphorically) wade through filth and much else besides, Argento the younger simultaneously radiates embarrassment in Dad's big dream project and unmeasured pride in same. You don't need to be related to him to feel something similar.

Not Reviewed

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