As a director who is probably most famous for a movie he didn’t make – Dune – Alejandro Jodorowsky is a filmmaker who will be a revelation for those new to his work.
There’s no better introduction than Santa Sangre, considered by some to be his most accessible film. However, even here, the plot is secondary to surrealist images, characters, settings, and ideas.
In Mexico, a young man, Fenix, escapes from an asylum, reuniting with his mother. As a child, he was part of a circus, a rag-tag affair where his alcoholic, womanising father ran the troupe while his acrobatic mother was the star attraction. She, the leader of a religious cult, the Church of Santa Sangre, becomes enraged with jealousy one night, seeing her husband having sex with the circus’s newest recruit – a tattoed lady with perhaps the most flexible hips in cinema. Mother’s reaction, witnessed by Fenix, sets the course of his adult life where he becomes the arms of his now adult mother (don’t ask, just watch it), to exact bloody murderous revenge in her name.
Watching Santa Sangre is a curious, engrossing sensation. In fact, sensational is the exact word to describe this descent into exploitation, depravity, insanity, love and revenge – one with circus clowns, an elephant’s funeral, and some truly grisly mutilations thrown in too.
Like a cross between Psycho and some of Dario Argento’s most depraved output, Santa Sangre is a gripping, sometimes horrifying, sometimes humorous and always captivating film.
In fact, it’s produced by Claudio Argento, Dario’s brother, so Santa Sangre certainly has a touch of the giallo about it – the characters and situations are over-the-top, and so is the gore. But amongst the psychological and physical horrors, there’s a moral sincerity running through it that makes Fenix’s journey – from little boy lost through to insane murderer to self-realisation both a moving and compelling one.
You don’t often come away from a film thinking that there’s not much else that’s quite like, but you just might come away from Santa Sangre with that feeling, which makes it all the more upsetting that we never did get to see what Jodorowsky had in store for his version of Dune.
This Severin Blu-ray edition shines in a beautiful 4K scan supervised by Jodorowsky himself. It looks as clean as the day it was made. He also provides a commentary. There’s a documentary that’s only 20 minutes shorter than the actual film, interviews galore, and more than enough to make sure that, if you are indeed new to Jodorowsky’s films, you’d gladly walk a flaming tightrope to see his others!
SANTA SANGRE is out now in a new 4K UHD / Blu-ray Combi set from Severin
