Not exactly the most prolific of directors, Alejandro Jodorowsky has nevertheless carved out a place as one of cinema’s true visionaries with his philosophical, ultra-violent, surreal and taboo-shattering works. Santa Sangre appeared almost two decade after his legendary breakthrough films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, and was released at a time when boundary-pushing violent cinema was butting heads with the MPAA in America – it was films like Santa Sangre and David Lynch’s Wild at Heart that would eventually lead to the well-meaning but ultimately doomed NC-17 rating.

Santa Sangre is a film of two halves. The first act is very much classic Jodorwosky, evoking the style and the obsessions of his earlier works – amputation, carnival, religious fanaticism and strange cults, the death of childhood and extreme sexuality. The film follows young circus performer Fenix (Adan Jodorowsky) as his life is pulled between his sleazy, adulterous knife thrower father and his religiously fanatical mother, a relationship that ends with mutilation and suicide.

In the second act, Fenix is now an adult (played by another Jodorowsky son, Axel) who escapes from a mental institution to become part of a bizarre stage act with his now armless mother, literally acting as her limbs. Unfortunately, this acts carries on off-stage, as his possessive and insane mother uses him to take revenge on any woman she sees as a rival for his affection.
This second half increasingly has the look and feel of a particularly vivid horror film – one murder scene could easily have come from producer Claudio Argento’s work with his brother Dario, and the plot is a strange, fevered hybrid of giallo, The Hands of Orlac and Psycho. Thankfully, Jodorowsky proves himself capable of creating a genuinely potent horror movie, deftly mixing the sex, horror and madness that the story requires, while still making it entirely and unmistakably his own work.

Santa Sangre is a good introduction to Jodorowsky for the uninitiated, given the (slightly) more conventional narrative structure mixed with his major obsessions and visual flair. It’s perhaps less a revolutionary experience than his earlier works, but in no way should be seen as their inferior. By any standards, this is still a visually hallucinogenic, challenging work of art and if you have yet to catch up with the great man’s work, it’s a fine place to begin.

This new release comes complete with the feature-length (and essential) documentary La Constellation Jodorowsky, a 27 featurette that is very French, a cute short film by Adan Jodorowsky, some deleted scenes and an ICA interview with the director from 2002. Most of this was on the previous Anchor Bay edition, so if you have that, you will only need this if you are upgrading to Blu-ray (and haven’t got the Severin edition).

DAVID FLINT

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