Hauntingly beautiful in a way that made me not want to vomit, Santa Sangre (Holy Blood) is a work of gentle and demented grace. Filled with enough lunacy, mental trauma (seeing your father struggling to maintain his composure with acid-soaked genitalia will do that), mentally challenged cocaine users, and circus sex to last an undetermined amount of time, Alejandro Jodorowsky (The Holy Mountain) has created a masterful ode to letting go of the past. A veiled cautionary tale about the dangers that could develop when you don't use your hands to do your own bidding, the colourful, gory (a man tries to force feed a little girl his own right ear), and richly layered enterprise is a mellifluous feast for the senses – primarily the ones that are indispensable when it comes to watching and listening to films. Whether it be the awe-inspiring visual splendour of the aerial shot of a beloved elephant bleeding from its trunk, the graveyard dream sequence (synthesizers whirl while white zombies lurch), or the maddening ferocity of the bongo music heard during a grislier than usual flophouse stabbing, everything about this film, optically and audibly, is heightened to the point of rapturous madness.
A dreamlike mishmash that jumps back and forth between reality and fantasy, and, not to mention, the past and the present, the story revolves around a mental patient named Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky). A deeply troubled man trying to come to grips with a violent incident that transpired between his parents when he was a child (Adan Jodorowsky), the film flashes back to when he performed in a traveling circus called Circo del Gringo. There we meet his knife throwing father Orgo (Guy Stockwell), his religious fanatic/trapeze artist mother Goncha (Blanca Guerra), and Alma (Faviola Elenka Tapia), the deaf-mute flaming tightrope walker he has a crush on.
The intensity of Alma's adorableness cannot be accurately measured using conventional methods.
Upsetting the big top equilibrium is a woman who is covered head-to-toe in tattoos. You see, Orgo has these little flings with the tattooed lady, and Goncha isn't too happy about it. Taking matters into her own hands, Goncha, in the spur of the moment, decides to throw a vitriolic liquid into Orgo's sexing area just as he was about to penetrate the tattooed lady with his penis (it's not a Jodorwsky flick until someone loses their junk). Even though in agony, Orgo manages to muster enough energy to chop off Goncha's arms.
Profoundly traumatized by this event (though it should be said that the large eagle chest tattoo he receives from his father and the elephant funeral procession were pretty trauma-inducing as well), we jump forward to when a now grownup yet catatonic Fenix is living in an insane asylum. Reinvigorated by a night on the hooker-filled streets with some of his fellow patients, Fenix is surprised to find his now armless mother calling to him from the street outside his cell/room. Leaving the confines of his self-stylized prison, the reunited mother-son startup a stage show that involves Fenix standing behind Goncha and acting out her arm movements.
Now, while this sounds like a cute idea for a show, the fact that Goncha has Fenix acting as her hands to do everyday chores is a tad disturbing. Things get even more troubling when Goncha starts forcing Fenix to carry out her murderous wishes. The barely sane Fenix could easily refuse to follow through with her unhinged desires, but you should have seen how inflamed Goncha became when the local monsignor told her the blood pool at her favourite church was merely paint. In fact, their heated back and forth that involved the expressions: "This is paint!" and "It's holy blood!" reminded me of a certain beer commercial from the 1980s. Anyway, what I'm trying to say is Goncha is not someone to be trifled with; even while armless.
The undulating undercarriage of the excessively tattooed woman known as "The Tattooed Woman" (played by the sturdily built Thelma Tixou) was a joy to revel in. Of course, I wouldn't go as far as to say that she was a nice person (pimping out your deaf-mute daughter to horny military personnel isn't exactly an endearing quality), but the sight of Thelma erotically savouring the exquisite longness of her ink-covered frame did a pretty good job of deflating any scorn I felt towards her. After all, she was basically just an exhibitionist who loved to give knives fellatio. And, in the long run, I can't stay mad at someone like that.
Your hands were given to you by the secretive overlords, the one's who live amongst the nonjudgmental hairs that cover the cavernous highway that is God's ass, in order to assist humankind when it comes to masturbating and eating cereal with some level of lordliness. Sure, you can pretty do both of those things without hands, but the sheer amount of rubbing and flailing involved would be so demanding, that you'd no doubt discontinue engaging in both activities after about five years of undignified struggle. Regardless, the inherent freewill to utilize your hands in any way you see fit was the main message I took away from Santa Sangre; that, and elephant funerals rarely end pleasantly. It doesn't matter if you come from a dysfunctional family populated by womanizing knife throwers and overzealous crackpots, your hands are a gift; manipulate them with impunity....
