![]() In The Holy Mountain, for instance, we watch a woman bring a giant robot to orgasm with a seven-foot dildo. I’m never quite sure what will happen next, but whatever it is, it will usually blow me away. I think that’s one of the great appeals of Jodorowsky’s films for me. Rest assured, I haven’t really spoiled anything. ![]() (Whenever Fenix stood behind his mother in the film, Guerra had her arms behind her back with her hands gripping Axel’s testicles. She’s completely domineering, controlling every aspect of his life, even accessing all of his thoughts. She stands there on the street, armless like her saint. Fenix hears his mother’s voice out the window. It’s the sulfuric acid and arm cutting scene I mentioned earlier. One night, Fenix watches his parents murder each other in a fit of rage and jealousy. When he’s not waddling in a daze, he’s ogling the tattooed lady (the imposing and stunning Thelma Tixou), who is eager to bend over and present to him like a dog in heat. His father (Guy Stockwell), a knife thrower and drunk, owned the circus and fled from America after killing a woman. His mother (Blanca Guerra) was a trapeze artist and religious fanatic who worshiped a blasphemous armless saint. We learn about Fenix’s childhood in the circus, where he’s played by Axel’s younger brother Adan. It’s not as crazy as the introductory section of The Holy Mountain (few things are), but it’s emotionally wrought and filled with compelling weirdness. What follows in the next 40 minutes is a remarkable flashback. At the beginning, he’s perched naked atop a tree inside a large room in an asylum. The film centers on a shell-shocked man named Fenix, played by Jodorowsky’s son Axel. You will get your fix of freaks, deformities, sex, derring-do, and spirit. But Jodorowsky gives the story his own stamp, creating a madcap a circus of the deadly and surreal. It’s the idea of murder and forgiveness that’s at the heart of Santa Sangre, easily Jodorowsky’s most coherent film. He had been successfully rehabilitated by the Mexican prison system, which made him a bit of a celebrity. Hernández was a real-life serial killer who murdered four women, including his girlfriend. While in a cafe in Mexico, a man named Gregorio Cárdenas Hernández went up to Jodorowsky to tell him he was a fan of the weekly comic strips he was doing in a local paper. The film itself was born from a run-in with a notorious Mexican criminal. It’s an Italian production filmed in the seediest parts of Mexico City, dubbed into English mostly by Italian voice actors faking Mexican accents. (Claudio Argento, Dario’s brother and frequent collaborator, produced Santa Sangre.) The movie’s soundtrack is a mix of mambo hits, organ grinders, and synthetic orchestras. There’s a murder scene that perfectly evokes the work of Dario Argento, from the stark colors to the shots of the killer’s hands. There’s a moment in which James Whale’s The Invisible Man is recreated while it plays in the background. The Boston Globe likened the movie to Luis Buñuel remaking Psycho. A lot of what’s going on in Santa Sangre is a series of collisions and references. There’s the poison of Jodorowsky’s rusty knife working its way into various veins, sure, but there’s also this play of disparate ideas and how they influence each other. (“Party All the Time” this is not.) There’s also a shot in Pulp Fiction that’s very similar to one in Santa Sangre, and it was probably intentional. In the Murphy song, it’s just a bit of preface to a hackneyed declaration of earth’s renewal. In the Jodorowsky film, the line is one of many potent declarations of childhood’s end. “The elephant is dying,” says a sad clown, and in thumps that 90s bassline groove. A line from Santa Sangre appeared in the song “Whatzupwitu,” a 1993 duet with Michael Jackson. Technically my first encounter with Alejandro Jodorowsky came by way of Eddie Murphy. Jodorowsky replied that a rusty blade is twice as deadly - it can cut you and also poison you. It bore none of the surrealism and mysticism that marked his most famous films, El Topo and The Holy Mountain, both of which are canonical works of cult cinema.Ī journalist at Cannes told Jodorowsky that he’d be rusty as a filmmaker. His previous film was Tusk, a bumbling Indian production about a girl and her pet elephant. In fact, he hadn’t made a movie he was proud of in more than 10 years. When it was announced at Cannes that Alejandro Jodorowsky would make the film, he hadn’t made a movie in several years. ![]() She sold me on the film with just a single sentence: “There’s a scene where a woman pours sulfuric acid on her husband’s dick, and then he chops off her arms.” One of the regulars at a video store I worked at recommended it to me. I first saw Santa Sangre in high school and still have my VHS copy of the movie.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |