Review of Santa Sangre (1989) by Ryan H — 09 Mar 2012

Santa Sangre is one of those films that has great ideas, and a solid ending, that if it had a more competent screenwriter it could have been a masterpiece. It's one of those art house films that has a strange style to it and most people will either love it or hate it.

Personally, I found it to work for this film. The cheesy performances work for the strange things that are going on. However, Jodorowsky seems to think that he is so genius and no one else is on his level.

Everyone else must be stupid. Or he might just love his concepts so much that he can't get enough of them. Whatever it is, the guys needed to chill out with explaining everything to his audience. After Fenix hallucinates, we don't need to hear him apologize to another character for hallucinating.

The character didn't need the apology, and we didn't need the explanation. We also don't need the explanation from his mother that his hero is The Invisible Man. Just let it play out! Jodorowsky also likes to have things make sense for the world he created later, but I don't quite get the world in the beginning of the film.

It's like he had these strange ideas that he wanted to incorporate, but not make sense. So, Felix starts out in a mental institution and he is naked perched on a tree. Everything in this world seems to function the same, so why would they have his place look like a zoo cage? Also, I never bought the worshipping of the armless woman.

She was raped, her arms were cut off, and they built a church around her blood (that is actually paint). That is all we get. Perhaps if this was told from his perspective of a flashback I would understand that perhaps he didn't understand it as a child and neither should we, but it just didn't work for me the way that it was done.

I did really love the psychology in the film about the kid growing up in a messed up family and he watched both parents die, so it screwed him up for life. Jodorowsky seemed to really care for Felix, which made the film bearable to sit through.

Even though I got tired of the faces he made, or him constantly crying as a kid, I was still wanting to see how things turned out for his character. It is a horror to see his the world from his distorted point of view.

It's also a decent character study. But with the film feeling like it's being told by a pompous ass, it's hard to really get into anything.