BEST SATURDAY NIGHT TOOTHACHE MOVIE......ARGENTO'S 'INFERNO'

Inferno (1980)   No......'Best Saturday Night Toothache Movie' is not one of the new Academy Award categories.....

                   But the Academy can help themselves and use it......on us.

                   With one side of our mouth feeling like we'd taken an all-night sock to the jaw......we needed a completely mindless, plotless, minimal-dialogue movie as a distraction.....

                    Enter, "Inferno", the second film in what eventually became director Dario Argento's 'Three Mothers' trilogy......about a trio of evil witches ruling the world from their home bases in Germany, Rome and New York.

                    With the German contingent beautifully and scarily rendered in 1977's 'Suspiria', Argento moved on to New York's 'Mother of Darkness', put together in the same freeform, hallucinatory style of the first film.

                    And we love the fact that 'Inferno' make even less of an attempt to establish anything resembling a storyline, character development and even a moment of coherence.......(hey, who the hell can pay attention to that stuff with a sour tooth anyway?)

                   From the get-go, it's nothing but an amusement park funhouse ride......you know, the rides where the cars jerk around in different directions as they whip you past visions of pop-up skeletons and fresh, blood-soaked corpses.

                  What's it about?  What are ya, kidding? 

                  It's about a couple of babes and a guy who wander around a huge art-deco apartment building until a pair of creepy hands leap out of nowhere and slice 'em up like deli meat.

                  Now you know what it's about.

                  Oops, let's not forget the hungry hordes of rats 'n cats.......with each species getting their turn to feast on the few other folks who live and work in the building.........(no wonder this huge dump has such a low occupancy rate....)

                  Thankfully for the BQ and our throbbing tooth, no plot complications ever arise to make us stop and think about what's going on........(not that we would have ever figured them out, sitting there in a codeine tablet haze.....)

                  We vaguely remember the Mom of Darkness herself finally showing up, turning into a big-ass skeleton and setting her whole place on fire........the perfect senseless ending to this crazy blue-and-red dreamscape of hapless people running around circles before they meet their gory doom.....

                  Sadly, by the time Argento got around to completing this trilogy, with 2007's "Mother Of Tears", he'd completely lost his nutball-horror mojo..........but we'll forever relish and revel in the delirious insanity of 'Suspiria' and 'Inferno'........with or without an aching tooth, you can dive into them with abandon....if you dare.

                 Our tooth's feeling much better now, thank you......and we're feeling 3 stars (***) for 'Inferno', which throbs and aches in its own special way.....