Touches You

The Worst Film Ever

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

All I'll say is that most everything written by "reviewers" of this movie is wrong. completely.Fenix does NOT rejoin his mother. She was murdered by his father when he was a boy. Fenix -- and we -- saw it with his own eyes, just as he saw his father slice his own throat and commit suicide. Trapped in a trailer, looking out at the horror, he lost his mind.When the movie begins, Fenix is in a sanitarium, NOT a mental hospital. There are other residents there, mainly young men and women with Down's Syndrome or mental retardation. They are not crazy people. The sanitarium is just that.When Fenix is taken on a field trip to the city's red-light district, his trauma is revisited and his horrible childhood memory invoked when he spots the tattooed woman; the linchpin of his and his family's terror.After returning to the sanitarium, Fenix looks out his cell to the street below and HALLUCINATES his mother. She is not really there. She is a VISION, a dream remnant, a wish fulfillment. As was shown early in the movie, he was deeply attached to his mother. Recall the scene when the church of Santa Sangre was being bulldozed and Fenix "rescued" his mother as she stood defiantly in front of the demolition crew. He was a mama's boy through and through. That's why his dad carved the phoenix tattoo on his chest. It was symbolic of a passage from mama's boy to young manhood.All the scenes that follow with his "mother" are him using a wooden dummy of her body, as revealed at the end. Also at the end, with the help of the girl from his childhood, is his realization of his own identity apart from his mother attachment."My hands!" "My hands," he rejoices, even as he's standing in the crosshairs of a swat team. The hold his mother had on him, even years after her death, is finally broken.So, discount every review that contends his armless mother "reappears." She was killed years before. Her death was also a form of wish fulfillment, since she had worshipped the saintly girl who had been killed by her father after he learned she was raped. Her father severed her arms as well.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's reputation as the creator of some of the craziest films ever seen had been cemented in the early 70's with the release of his two most famous films, El Topo (1970) and The Holy Mountain (1973). In this era of psychedelia and cinematic experimentation, weird movies were almost actively encouraged and so an extreme left-field talent such as Jodorowsky could flourish. But times changed and cinema became increasingly commercialized meaning that he did not make any comparable movies for many years, that is until Claudio Argento stepped up to help finance another surrealist feature, to that end we ended up with Santa Sangre. It's probably relevant to mention the Argento here; as Santa Sangre is not a million miles away from the kind of film his brother Dario was famous for directing, i.e. hyper-stylized slasher horror opuses. In fact, with this film Jodorowsky seems to be channelling his own style via Argento with Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini mixed in for good measure. It's a heady concoction for sure and the result is rather good. It definitely has to be said that, while this is still very much a surrealist movie, it is nevertheless a much less experimental feature that Jodorowsky's earlier aforementioned works, hence, it is considerably more accessible, character-driven and has a pretty clear narrative. Irrespective of all this, it remains a somewhat strange film. Set around circus people, the story revolves around the son of a trapeze artist mother and knife-throwing strongman father, the latter of which has an affair with the tattooed lady, which results in a violent confrontation where he gets acid in the groin and she has her arms decapitated. The young son witnesses the carnage and ends up in a mental hospital as a result of the trauma. Years later he escapes from the asylum and reunites with his mother who he now provides the arms for. A series of brutal murders follows.To be perfectly honest this is my favourite of Jodorowsky's features. It's probably on account of it being a bit of a cross-over movie where he combined his uncanny ability for conjuring up surrealist imagery with a narrative that was easier to get involved in, plus I also thoroughly enjoyed the extra addition of some good old fashioned gory horror. So what we have is part psychological horror, part slasher film, part melodrama, part surrealist movie, part black comedy; and all of this with a strong Mexican flavor. As could perhaps be expected, there are a number of very striking images to savour too. There is the elaborate burial of an elephant via a sealed skip being ritually dropped off a cliff only to have the inner entrails ripped out to be used as food by the slum dwellers, there is a dwarf in an Aladdin suit, a super-sexy buxom tattooed temptress, a church dedicated to an armless saint, cabaret shows, mime artistry, bloody knife attacks, cocaine sniffing Downs Syndrome children and a sanitarium cell with a tree inside it. There are soaring shots over the streets of Mexico City, vivacious Latin music and elaborate religious imagery. In other words, this is bold imaginative film-making at its best and showed clearly that Jodorowsky certainly had not mellowed in the preceding years.

A young man is confined in a mental hospital. Through a flashback we see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers: he saw his father cut off the arms of his mother, a religious fanatic and leader of the heretical church of Santa Sangre ("Holy Blood"), and then commit suicide.Santa Sangre did not receive a wide release in the U.S. since its original premiere, only screening at a few theaters familiar with Jodorowsky's previous work. On January 25, 2011, Severin Film gave the film a release on both DVD and Blu-ray with more than "five hours of exclusive extras". If you have seen the film, this is probably where you saw it (though it was on Netflix for a while).Roger Ebert gave the film a positive review, and said that he believed it carried the moral message of genuinely opposing evil, rather than celebrating it like most contemporary horror films. Ebert described it as "a horror film, one of the greatest, and after waiting patiently through countless Dead Teenager Movies, I am reminded by Alejandro Jodorowsky that true psychic horror is possible on the screen – horror, poetry, surrealism, psychological pain and wicked humor, all at once." Although I like the "dead teenager films" Ebert has a problem with, he is right to praise this film. It is glorious, and really captures the strange imagery we come to expect. Perhaps not as strange as "Holy Mountain", still strange enough to astound.

Never thought this would appear on DVD, but now here it is both there and on Blu Ray. I watched it on the latter format, and it looks great, of course. This film is important in my development as a film buff. I probably owe my love of cult films to it more than to any other film. I caught it in that important summer right after college, where I saw just a ton of great films. I had never heard of this, but I saw it in the foreign section and the cover intrigued me. It instantly became one of my favorites, and I rented it several more times over the years. I haven't seen it for well over a decade now, which means that I was a tad worried about whether it would hold up.I wasn't that worried, though, because I have watched Fando and Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain in the meantime, and I do still like all of those movies fine. Yes, Santa Sangre holds up very nicely. I realized in the intervening years that Jodorowsky isn't a director to take seriously, no matter how seriously he takes himself (he definitely thinks he's one of the greatest geniuses to walk the Earth). Though one would think that it should be Bunuel to fill the roll, I think of Jodorowsky as the Salvador Dali of cinema. I don't like to put Bunuel in that spot because, unlike Dali, Bunuel is a fully fledged artist. Dali just liked to draw weird crap. But, hey, it's neat and fun to look at. Jodorowsky has an imagination much like Dali, throwing a bunch of weird, neat, fun crap on the screen for me to ogle. I do still think Santa Sangre is Jodorowsky's strongest work, because there's enough of a story (which is pretty much a take on Psycho) to keep it from getting boring.