Film

Santa Sangre (1989)

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Like some Fellini-esque nightmare, this heady mix of circus freaks (a tattooed lady, an exotic midget, sad-faced clowns) and weird religious and hallucinatory imagery (an armless virgin saint, writhing snakes, zombie brides) is pregnant with disturbing psychological undercurrents. Traumatised at an early age by a violent argument between his knife-throwing father (Stockwell) and trapeze-artist mother (Guerra), former child magician Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky), now 20, escapes from an asylum into the outside world. Reunited with his jealous mother, Fenix becomes her 'arms' in a bizarre pantomime act, a role which spills dangerously over into real life. With a tapestry of cultural references that embraces the Venus de Milo, Marcel Marceau, Liberace and Night of the Living Dead, Jodorowsky's is a strange, violent, but ultimately liberating vision.

---

• 
•