Santa Sangre Review

Most people don't have the time, money, or energy to watch a lot of movies, so when you do get a chance to watch something, you want it to be good. That's why Rotten Tomatoes exists: to give a snapshot of whether a movie is worth your time. But does it always work? I'll be watching all of Rotten Tomatoes’ Certified Fresh movies from this Wikipedia list starting in the year 1990, the decade I was born, and we'll see if these movies are really worth the hype.

Movie 9 of 1990:

Santa Sangre, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, made me feel very uncomfortable. I suppose that was the intention of the piece, but I really couldn't get over how atrocious some of this content was. I'm a lover of weird horror and things that people might find disturbing, but I really didn't get this one at all.

My biggest takeaway was that I'm pretty sure the director hates women. Women were consistently being brutalized for exhibiting sexual desire. Our Norman Bates-esque protagonist is Fénix (Axel Jodorowsky), who kills women he is attracted to because he thinks he is his mother Concha’s (a brilliantly campy Blanca Guerra) arms. The only woman who manages to escape brutalization is Fénix's childhood friend Alma (Sabrina Dennison). I really felt like I was watching a Madonna-whore complex playing out, but in a way that I found disturbing and unhelpful.

At least I can say the effects were visually interesting. The violence was done in the style of a giallo horror movie, which makes sense considering Claudio Argento co-wrote the script with the director. The violence, however, was essentially all directed at women. I don't always think that's a bad thing if it aids in the narrative, but here it just felt mean-spirited. I also think the movie was pretty mean-spirited toward differently abled people. It felt like the director was going for a 1932's Freaks vibe, but at least those characters had some sort of agency.

The circus sequences at the beginning felt very overlong. The only thing I really found interesting about that prologue was the concept of the religious cult Concha was part of, but once the Santa Sangre temple came down, so did any culty religious plotline. The whole asylum bit was unnecessary as well, and I hated how the story treated the people there. I felt like the main plot didn't start until over an hour in, which honestly made me pretty bored.

I know I'm in the minority on this, but I just didn't get it. This is even the genre of film that I love the most, but I didn't really get anything out of it other than the main character has mommy issues, and the director might hate women. At least I can say it was memorable because I will always remember how much I didn't like this movie.

Rotten Tomatoes Score: 88%

Is it worth the hype?:

Not at all. I'll go as far as to say I don't understand how this is so well-received. As a surrealist horror fan, I was hoping to love this, and I just didn't. I found many of the sequences mean-spirited and unnecessary. I wouldn't check this one out unless you're a huge Jodorowsky fan.