It’s a weird film — an acquired taste that’s best suited for those with a strong stomach for bloodbaths and freaks.

Jodorowsky has been all of the following things in his artistic career: a puppeteer, a circus performer, a mime, a playwright, a film director, a novelist and a comic book author. I have been turned on by his stunning visuals and turned off by his penchant for exploitative and gratuitous violence. Jodorowsky’s surrealist filmmaking techniques call for an unhealthy mixture of gore and an unbearable holier-than-thou critique of society. It’s Jodorowsky’s first film after a 10-year hiatus, and is made on a higher budget than his usual films.

It opens with the nude twenty-year-old Fenix (Axel Jodorowsky, the director’s son) locked in a sanitarium cell and sitting atop a tree, where in a flashback we see how he was traumatized as a child magician by his dysfunctional circus parents: Concha (Blanca Guerra), a fiery trapeze artist who swings from her own long black hair and is also a crazed religious fanatic belonging to a strange cult that worships a woman who was attacked by two men who chopped off her arms, raped her and left her for dead in a pool of her own blood. His dad Orgo (Guy Stockwell) is a drunk and carnival knife-thrower. As a passing to manhood ritual, Fenix’s father ties him to a chair and carves a big tattoo of a phoenix into his chest with a knife.

One day, while performing her high-wire act, Concha spies Orgo screwing the Tattooed Woman (Thelma Tixou). In a jealous rage, she exits the circus floor and douses Orgo’s genitals with sulfuric acid. In a rage and in pain, Orgo slices off Concha’s arms with his knives and then slits his own throat — with young Fenix witnessing it all (no wonder the kid grew up with severe psychological problems!).