Santa Sangre

(1989)

★ 7.2 IMDb · 521 votes

Genres: Horror, Drama, Thriller

Year: 1989

Runtime: 123 мин

Country: Italy, Mexico

Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky

Cast: Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, Faviola Elenka Tapia, Teo Jodorowsky, Jesús Juárez, Gloria Contreras

Plot

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his armless, cult leader mother, and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name.

A young man--starving, nearly catatonic and barely responsive--is confined in a sanitarium. He is taken on a field trip along with other residents to the city's red-light district. There, he encounters by chance a woman from his past, triggering a series of flashbacks. We see that he was traumatized as a child, when he and his family were circus performers, and when he witnessed a murder/suicide: his father, an American expatriate living in Mexico under suspicious circumstances, cuts off the arms of his beloved mother, a possessive wife and religious fanatic who led a heretical church called "Santa Sangre (Holy Blood)," the members of which worshipped a martyred girl whose arms were severed by her father following her rape, and then commit suicide. Back in the present, buttressed by shock of his remembrance, he escapes the sanitarium and, in a series of hallucinations and dream-fulfillments, believes he has rejoined his armless mother. He "becomes her arms" and the "two" undertake a grisly campaign of murder and revenge.