Santa Sangre Mexico-Italy (1989): Horror/Thriller CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 3.0 stars out of 5 118 min, Rated NC-17, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc Admittedly, director Alejandro Jodorowsky's first film in 10 years and only his third since his notorious 1971 debut, the surrealist western EL TOPO, SANTA SANGRE is nearly a decade out of step. Although obviously not for every taste, SANTA SANGRE is, however, a film that no adventurous moviegoer can afford to miss. Despite the film's surrealist trappings, parody is at the heart of this effort. Unfortunately, Jodorowsky chooses to parody oedipal slasher films, which long ago slipped into the realm of self-parody (especially the latter installments in the series that began with FRIDAY THE 13TH, 1980), if, indeed, they were ever intended to be taken seriously. Synopsis Sanitarium patient. SANTA SANGRE begins with a brief scene involving a Christ-like nude perched on a tree limb in what appears to be the cell of a sanitarium. A doctor and nurses arrive with food: a conventional dinner and a plate of raw fish. It's the fish, of course, that brings the man down from his perch. While the doctor and nurses coax him into overalls, an elaborate tattoo of an eagle is revealed on the young man's chest. The film promptly flashes back to tell the story behind the tattoo as well as the story behind the young man's present state. Childhood revealed: As a youngster, Fenix (played as a child by Jodorowsky's son Adan Jodorowsky, then as an adult by his elder son, Axel) is billed as the world's youngest magician. He performs his act for the Circus del Gringo, run by his womanizing father, Orgo (Guy Stockwell), and his mother, Concha (Blanca Guerra), a crazed religious fanatic. Fenix is assisted in his act by an ethereal deaf-mute girl, who always wears white-face makeup, and with whom he is falling in puppy love. To initiate Fenix into manhood his father painstakingly (and painfully) carves the eagle tattoo into the boy's chest. But Fenix's life takes an even more traumatic turn when Concha, enraged by her husband's latest infidelity (with the circus's curvaceous tattooed lady, the deaf-mute's mother), interrupts the adulterers in bed, and attacks Orgo's genitals with acid. Orgo, a knife thrower, retaliates with the tools of his trade, slicing off Concha's arms before slitting his own throat. Having been locked in his trailer by Concha, Fenix must then watch helplessly as the tattooed lady and her daughter disappear into the night following the bloodbath. Vengeful adult: Back in the present, Fenix, on a field trip with his fellow patients, spots the tattooed lady, now a drunken prostitute, and is consumed with rage. Coaxed into escaping from the sanitarium by the armless Concha, Fenix becomes her vengeful "hands," both in a bizarre nightclub act and in an orgy of murder that only begins with his skewering of the tattooed lady. Fenix's later victims include a hardened, drug-addicted stripper who becomes a virginal, coquettish schoolgirl onstage, and a wrestler, the "world's strongest woman," who fights off a small army of male wrestlers in her act. Difficult decision: The film's climax is brought about by the reappearance of the deaf-mute girl, now grown up (played by deaf actress Sabrina Dennison). Fenix is stirred to revolt when Concha orders him to kill this beautiful young woman, his former love, just as he has killed all the other women who have brought confusion into his life. Critique--Mixed success: SANTA SANGRE could hardly be described as boring. Moreover, gorgeously photographed and crammed with the startling imagery for which Jodorowsky is justly famed, the film is never less than visually beautiful . It also boasts a splendidly effective cast, even if Axel Jodorowsky is a dead ringer, both in looks and acting style, for Bronson Pinchot. Yet the film can't help but remain stubbornly earthbound because of its derivative, pedestrian scenario, too-obviously bearing the influence of its producer, Claudio Argento, the younger brother of splashy Italian horror specialist Dario Argento. Whether SANTA SANGRE would have been a better film had it been more purely Jodorowsky's work is debatable. The surrealist interludes here recall Bu³uel, but never attain an identity of their own. If anything, they come across as calculated and intellectualized in a way that is almost the antithesis of Bu³uel's instinctual approach. Still, if Jodorowsky is not yet worthy of inclusion in the pantheon with Bu³uel and Hitchcock (the latter can be either credited with or blamed for starting the oedipal-slasher trend with PSYCHO, 1960), he is, nonetheless, in a class by himself.