MOVIE REVIEW : Jodorowsky Serves Up More of the Same in ‘Santa Sangre’

Alejandro Jodorowsky, the Chilean-born maestro of wretched excess, is back at it after a 10-year absence. “Santa Sangre” (at the Nuart) is a grisly, grotesque cross between “Psycho” and the Tod Browning-Lon Chaney “The Unknown” served up with the writer-director’s usual mishmash of religious and Freudian symbolism topped with Fellini flourishes.

That Jodorowsky displays absolutely no sense of humor--and not an iota of subtlety either--makes this Mexican picture, which is being shown in a stilted English-language version, seem as silly as it is morbid.

No wonder our hero Fenix (played by 8-year-old Adan Jodorowsky) suffers a mental breakdown, for he has witnessed his mother Concha (Blanca Guerra) and father El Gran Orgo (a portly Guy Stockwell), the gross, knife-throwing proprietor of Circo Gringo, caught up in the most savage acts of jealous rage and revenge. From the high wire, Concha spies her husband and the circus’ voluptuous tattooed woman (Thelma Tixou) in the heat of passion.

She throws a lethal dose of acid at his genitals; dying, he retaliates by slicing off her arms. There’s crude poetic justice at work here, for Concha has been the high priestess at a Mexico City temple dedicated to the worship of a young girl raped by two brothers, who then cut off her arms; in the Browning film, Chaney plays a knife thrower who pretends to be armless, but then cuts off his arms in a macabre and tragic expression of love.

Escaping from the asylum at age 20, Fenix (now played by Axel Jodorowsky) becomes his mother’s red-nailed “hands,” both offstage and on, where she pantomimes/recites the Fall in the Garden of Evil (inspired by “The Creation of the World” by mime Marcel Marceau, with whom Alejandro Jodorowsky worked and studied for six years). One of those crazed puritans who believe that all women other than herself are whores, Concha wills her son to become a mass murderer.

Consumed with self-hatred, Fenix tries to concoct a potion that will render him invisible in emulation of Claude Rains in “The Invisible Man.” However, his name isn’t Fenix--that’s Spanish for phoenix --for nothing.

There’s no denying Jodorowsky’s visual flair in this film (rated a lenient R, considering the bloodshed), as in its all-too-similar predecessors, “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain,” but once again he exercises no restraint whatsoever upon his feverish imagination, which results repeatedly in the most obvious, overstated symbolism. Those weirdly compelling moments when Fenix becomes his mother’s graceful, expressive hands and arms are lost amid gallons of spilled blood and garish, overwrought tableaux.

‘SANTA SANGRE’ (‘HOLY BLOOD’)

An Expanded Entertainment release of an Intersound production. Executive producers Rene Cardona Jr., Angelo Iacono. Producer Claudio Argento. Director Alejandro Jodorowsky. Screenplay Jodorowsky, Roberto Leoni, Argento; adapted for the screen by Leoni from an original story by Jodorowsky. Camera Daniele Nannunzi. Music Simon Boswell. Production designer Alejandro Luna. Costumes Tolita Figueroa. Makeup supervisor Lamberto Marini. Film editor Mauro Bonanni. With Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, Faviola Elenka Tapia, Jesus Juarez, Sergio Bustamante.

Running time: 2 hours.

MPAA-rated: R (under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian).