Santa Sangre (1989)

After the critical success and cult status of El Topo and The Holy Mountain director Alejandro Jodorowsky was tapped to do an adaptation of Dune.  This was in the mid-1970s and was supposed to feature music by Pink Floyd, sets designed by H.R. Giger and Salvadore Dali making an appearance as the Emperor.  With a script by Dan O'Bannon, who had worked with John Carpenter on his own cult hit Dark Star, this had about anything anyone who was a fan of the Frank Herbert novel could want, and then some.  Except funding. 

Jodorowsky wasn't that far out a choice, considering he had often written for the science fiction comic magazine Heavy Metal.  Still, the budget never materialized.  O'Bannon and Giger still ended up contributing to Alien, while Dune itself made it to theaters in 1984 with an adaptation directed by David Lynch.  As for Jodorowsky he ended up making a children's movie called Tusk, about a British girl in India befriending an elephant.  After that he pretty much disappeared from the scene.  That is, until Roberto Leoni pitched him the idea of Santa Sangre, and managed to get Claudio Argento involved to help with the script and provide the needed money to get it off the ground.  

Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky) is in a home for developmentally challenged adults.  He typically behaves like a bird, and his doctors hope to socialize him and start leading him to being more human.  We get to see the situation that put him there, showing his experiences as a child (Adan Jodorowsky) while part of a traveling circus, where he befriended a little person named Aladin (Jesús Juárez) and a deaf-mute tightrope walker named Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia).  Alma's guardian is a tattooed lady (Thelma Tixou) who comes on to Fenix's knife-throwing father Orgo (Guy Stockwell).  Fenix's mother, a religious fanatic and acrobat named Concha (Blanca Guerra), reacts violently when she finds Orgo and the tattooed lady together.  

This results in Fenix becoming an orphan and Alma being taken away when her guardian flees.  We rejoin him in the modern day when he is sent on a trip with others from the home and sees the tattooed woman, now working as a prostitute.  Alma (Sabrina Dennison) is still with her but goes in search of Fenix after she returns to find the lady dead.  Fenix, meanwhile, has escaped the home after the return of his mother, who, now armless, uses her control over Fenix to make him do her bidding, which includes killing off anyone that might take her son away. 

Santa Sangre is a Jodorowsky film so there is much more going on under the plot but, considering the hallucinatory tangents and non-traditional narrative styles in El Topo and The Holy Mountain, this is a pretty straightforward movie.  There is some playing around with reality but, on the surface, it can be enjoyed as a strange, artsy horror film.  The violence is similar to an Argento film or a lot of '70s Japanese flicks, with a large amount of spray accompanying stabbings and dismemberments.  The violent scenes in it are brief, but effective, particularly in Fenix's flashbacks. 

This movie does focus on fanaticism, Oedipal complexes, nurture versus nature as well as Mexican culture.  It is presented in such a striking manner of visual storytelling that it stays with the viewer for years.  I saw Santa Sangre the first time for a university class dealing with sex and religion, and this is the only thing I remember from the entire semester, as the violence caused a number of students to leave and a bunch of us weird cinephiles to stay for the duration.  This is a movie that I think gets less attention than it deserves because of the horror elements, where scenes such as the elephant funeral, the trip to the red-light district and Fenix's visions of his victims rising from their graves are up there among the most memorable scenes by Fellini, Bergman and Tarkovsky.  

The only thing that brings it down a notch is some of the acting, and I don't consider that the actors' fault.  The decision was made to make this in English despite it being filmed in Mexico and, except for Guy Stockwell, featuring a mainly Mexican cast.  Therefore, some of the line delivery may be a bit off and, even in the recent 4K version, some of the audio on the actors isn't the best.  Still, what they have to say isn't the point, but what they do.  Since Alma is mute Sabrina Dennison must play her role through gestures and Axel is a great physical actor, while Blanca Guerra seems the most comfortable in both method and language. 

This is one of my favorite Latin American films, and still one of the most memorable and visually appealing of all time.  I will never understand the obsession in foreign films with circuses and clowns, but in this case that background works and adds to the plot rather than just being there for some incomprehensible symbolism or just because circuses are lazy shorthand for things being weird.  It is the rare film that can revel in b-movie fandom while also celebrating and lamenting a culture at the same time.  For me this has always been the pinnacle of Jodorowsky's movies because, after some time away, there wasn't an expectation from audiences, nor from the director himself, on what he should do next, thus granting himself the needed freedom he craved to make another in a series of unique films. 

Santa Sangre (1989)

Time: 123 minutes

Starring: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Sabrina Dennison, Guy Stockwell

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky