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It was only a 28-year-long wait for fans, but at long last, the final installment of Italian director Dario Argento’s The Three Mothers trilogy arrived on DVD this September. Titled The Mother of Tears, Argento’s latest offering finishes what he first began with his 1977 film Suspiria, completing a somewhat disjointed tale of three powerful witches and the evil that befalls those who get in their way.

Like its predecessors, Suspiria and Inferno (1980), The Mother of Tears tells the story of some poor, unfortunate soul who unwittingly stumbles upon evidence of witchcraft and, after investigating how deep the occult rabbit hole goes, discovers that he or she has been drawn helplessly into a maelstrom of savage and bloody murders. And as usual, the only way out for our protagonist is through a head-on confrontation with one of the three mothers. You can probably guess how each movie ends. You can also probably guess why, unless there is an estranged fourth witch-mother hiding out somewhere in Argento’s imagination, this trilogy will most likely remain a trilogy.

Don’t get me wrong, though; despite its predictability, there is much in Mother of Tears to be admired. For one thing, Argento makes effective use of many of the contemporary movie-making technologies and techniques unavailable to him during the production of the trilogy’s first two parts. Even a brief dip into the Argento corpus shows he has a knack for interestingly framed and dramatically lit shots, and Mother of Tears gives us good reason to think that old age has not robbed Argento of this skill. There is, for instance, a close-up shot of a short blade slicing through wax that is quite visually stunning. Overall (with the exception of some very poorly executed CGI), the result of combining Argento’s artistic sensibilities with better filmmaking technology is a well-polished and, at times, cinematographically arresting movie.

Still, I could not help cringing as I watched this film and not because Argento is “the Italian master of horror.” With almost 30 years between Inferno and Mother of Tears, I had hoped Argento might have done a little growing up as a filmmaker. I had hoped that Mother of Tears would showcase the talent of an older, wiser Argento with a more nuanced but no less powerful approach to horror. And here, I was left very disappointed. While this film happily lacks the hackneyed, almost obligatory someone-gets-stabbed-right-in-the neck scene found in many Argento films, the famed director-writer sinks horrendously lower when instead, he shows us a woman being impaled to death through her vagina. If the art one produces is a window to one’s soul, then this scene alone seems to betray not only a very deep confusion about where to draw the line between violence and sex but also a disturbingly intense misogyny on Argento’s part. In fact, throughout the film, women are oversexualized at every turn, often signaling when something overly violent and gory is about to happen. There also seems to be an unimaginatively homophobic streak running through Mother of Tears: The best Argento can do to emphasize the perverse evil of the Mother of Tears’ coven (besides a shot of them engaging in cannibalism) is to show two of the lesser witches making out. Such daring innovation! Such a sophisticated understanding of the nature of evil! Sadly, it seems the only thing Argento learned between Inferno and Mother of Tears was how to dust off his old bag of misogynistic, ultraviolent tricks.