Santa Sangre (1989)
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky
A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.
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What critics compared Santa Sangre to
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of my favorite filmmakers, having directed the cult-beloved spiritual freakouts El Topo (1970), The Holy Mountain (1973), and the truly unusual NC-17-rated horror film Santa Sangre (1989).
Personally, after seeing “El Topo,” “The Holy Mountain,” and “Santa Sangre,” I have yet to see a film of his that hasn’t turned out to be a complete disaster, but there’s no denying that he has his fans.
However, outré Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky of El Topo and Santa Sangre fame/infamy was nearly the first to adapt Dune for the big screen in the mid-1970’s.
Apart from creating some of the most transgressive films ever made (see “Holy Mountain” and “Santa Sangre”), he has directed over 100 plays and written more than a hundred books, plays, and comic books.
An actor, poet, graphic novelist, and director, Jodorowsky is best known for his brilliant cult films: surreal, psychedelic head-trip films such as El Topo, The Holy Mountain, and Santa Sangre.
Backed by the Paris-based producer Michel Seydoux, the guru-like director of El Topo and Santa Sangre worked for two years on this grand folly, recruiting a team that included the French comic-book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, Hollywood screenwriter and special effects expert Dan O’Bannon, and future Alien designer H.R. Giger.
Yes, it's Psycho, but it's also the Theatre of the Absurd, acid castration, El Santo wrestling flicks, Whale's The Invisible Man, a chubby burlesque queen doffing off her schoolgirl plaids to "Besame Mucho," and a gigantic python slithering out of the hero's pants as he eyes a potential flame.
Bootleg discs and special screenings aside (the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art booked "Santa Sangre" in October, on a double bill with Whale's 1933 "The Invisible Man," a movie that "Sangre" embraces), "Santa Sangre" has been hard to see in America since its theatrical release, when it was edited for an R rating.
From the ever-present Greek chorus of clowns and circus musicians to Fenix's oddly poetic obsession with James Whale's The Invisible Man, Santa Sangre is at once disturbingly perverse yet strangely logical within its fucked-up framework; more than a handful of visceral images are likely to burn themselves into your memory banks for good.
Santa Sangre is as familiarly esoteric as Jodorowsky’s other efforts, but it possesses very pronounced influences, including Psycho , Freaks (Tod Browning is Jodorowsky’s cinematic father), The Who’s Tommy, The Invisible Man, and even Fellini’s partiality to the circus.
The first half of the film, when Fenix is a boy, is a surreal circus story that owes a debut to Browning's masterpiece "Freaks" (1932) as well as to such lurid thrillers as "Circus of Horrors" (1960).
On paper, Jodorowsky's vision seems drawn equally from the works of Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock (most blatantly Psycho ), and perhaps incidentally, Tod Browning's Freaks , but the effect of his kaleidoscopic vision never feels culled from any cloths not of his own making.
Santa Sangre is as familiarly esoteric as Jodorowsky’s other efforts, but it possesses very pronounced influences, including Psycho , Freaks (Tod Browning is Jodorowsky’s cinematic father), The Who’s Tommy, The Invisible Man, and even Fellini’s partiality to the circus.
No wonder the end credits include a thank you to director Alejandro Jodorowsky, impresario of such arthouse/grindhouse sideshows as " El Topo " (a mystical Spaghetti Western) and " Santa Sangre " (an allegorical slasher film).
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He dedicates his film to the Chilean-born Russian surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky , a cult director of the 1970s and 80s whose violent fables El Topo and Santa Sangre , which once outraged critics and pleased midnight movie enthusiasts, were infamous for their scenes of mutilation.