Santa Sangre

Release Date: June 27, 1990
Runtime: 123 minutes
Rating: NC-17
Studio: Republic Pictures
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Cast: Axel Jodorowsky; Adan Jodorowsky; Blanca Guerra; Guy Stockwell; Thelma Tixou; Sabrina Dennison; Faviola Elenka Tapia

My second trip down the Jodorowsky freeway took me into the strange land of Santa Sangre. The director’s 1989 carny-horror opus is a much more technically competent, narratively cohesive film than my previous Jodorowsky viewing, The Holy Mountain. Yet, and perhaps as a result of this advancement in craftsmanship, Santa Sangre is a much more boring film. Whereas The Holy Mountain had a certain acid-trippy audacity permeating the celluloid, Santa Sangre just feels weird for weird’s sake. There’s no sense of The Holy Mountain’s boundary pushing, just grossing out; no indication of the previous film’s go-for-broke cinematic abandon. Jodorowsky’s film is never as ethereal or as dream-like as it wants to, or should, be.

Evident in Santa Sangre is much of the same religious imagery and biblical allusions of The Holy Mountain: crucifixes, Christ figures, etc. Early on in the film, after a beloved circus elephant dies and the funeral procession carries his sarcophagus to its resting place (an understatement…it’s rather ungracefully dumped into a trash heap), nearby children leap onto the coffin and tear away at the elephant’s body, tossing bits and pieces of it into the crowd in a sort-of metaphorical dissemination of the body of Christ. The more prominent Christ figure is the main protagonist, Fenix (played as an adult by Axel Jodorowsky and as child by Adan Jodorowsky, the director’s kids). When we encounter Fenix (a large portion of the film is told via flashback) he is almost feral, institutionalized in a sanitarium where he lives in a tree (literally). You see, young Fenix was a witness to his father’s suicide immediately following dad’s gruesome mutilation of Fenix’s mother (to be fair, she doused his pecker in acid – nice family). This was enough to drive adolescent Fenix (and really, anyone) straight to the loony bin: which is exactly what happened. Years later, adult Fenix chances to cross paths with the woman with whom his father was having an affair, and the chance encounter ignites a vengeful streak in Fenix, and he sets out to avenge his mother’s death, in his own psychotic way.

The story structure, while fairly straightforward, introduces plot points that are opened but never closed. While undoubtedly strange, Jodorowsky never provides an explanation, however symbolic, for why Fenix would have assumed his feral state, or why he would be living in a tree and sleeping in what is essentially a doggie day bed. His savagery is never addressed and neither is Fenix’s late-movie obsession with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, which comes out of nowhere. Jodorowsky presents these threads, one assumes, to ostensibly forge a connection between the religious allegory and Fenix. Yet the loops are never tied up, leaving the viewer confused.

Once in a while, a sequence will work quite well. For example, an early scene depicting Fenix as Jesus (naturally) surrounded by a flock of doves is an arresting image, and a late cemetery sequence including ghostly figures rising from their graves to haunt Fenix is staged well. But on the whole, with the exception of a handful of violent scenes (which aren’t very convincing), the movie lurches dangerously close to unintentional comedy, especially when you fuse the hyperbolic acting styles with the general oddness on display. The result is that Santa Sangre is a relatively banal, at times dialogue-less, tale of a man with mommy issues who goes on a killing spree. Imagine Psycho as directed by John Waters and you’ll get an idea of Santa Sangre.