HallowLooyuh 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.

hellholehorror I didn't finish the movie first time round. It was pretty tedious going. The whole thing went on too long with nothing happening and unconnected events jumping around in a boring way. If you can put up with the tedium then this might just be a good film. There is one truly sick and brutal stabbing scene and some blood going everywhere but otherwise nothing to note except an unnerving sense that I had seen it before. The whole theatrical style was just painful. The ending did not validate anything and left me wandering what the hell what I just watched was about.

gavin6942 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.

darren-153-890810 I recently got into weird, arty & surreal films and this one is right up there. It's so bizarre and strange yet beautifully poetic and dreamy at the same time.There's something about the circus that fascinates me, the constant touring, the mystery, the colourful images, the sadness and detachment away from normality.The great thing about this film is subtle enough for you to actually work out what's going on. It won't be everyones kind of film but it's definitely mine. I was totally gripped from the opening scene.If you want to feel like you're on magic mushrooms then I would recommend this hands down, pardon the pun there!