Santa Sangre

Alejandro Jodorowski's phantasmagorical film plays out like a mix of Psycho, Pulp Fiction, and Freaks as directed by both Fellini and Bunuel. What business a combination like that has of working, I'll never know, but this film does have a strange beauty to it in the way that it shows you things you've probably never seen before in a movie. I was particularly fond of the first half in which we see Fenix as a young boy growing up in the circus, son of the strong man and the trapeze lady. His father is secretly running off with the tatooed lady, whose daughter is a mute mime who is fond of Fenix. Much has been made of the scene in which after the elephant dies it is placed in an enormous coffin, paraded across town and then ceremoniously dropped into the junk yard where a group of starving peasants gather around, break through the coffin and cut up the elephant for food. His mother finds out about the fathers infidelity and throws acid on his crotch, in response, he cuts off both of her arms and then slits his own throat because of his immasculation. The second half takes place a number of years later and has these uber-Oedipal undertones as he effectively becomes the arms of his mother and lacks any will of his own, to the point that he begins murdering girls that he develops a sexual interest in at her command. All of this probably sounds incredibly strange, and it is. This is unusually bold filmmaking. The fact that it even works at all is a testament of Jodorowski's direction and vision. It's certainly not a film for all tastes, but it is by no means tasteless. This is a film that is similar to a dozen other films and utterly unlike anything that I have ever seen before, which is an accomplishment in and of itself.