gavin6942 A mysterious black-clad gunfighter (Alejandro Jodorowsky) wanders a mystical Western landscape encountering multiple bizarre characters.Phil Hardy wrote, "Rather in the manner of Federico Fellini, whose self-conscious conflation of the roles of charlatan and ringmaster of the unconscious Jodorowsky apes, the film is a breathtaking concoction of often striking, but more often ludicrous, images. The result is a movie that, though it impressed many at the time of its original release, in retrospect is clearly a minor, albeit often very funny work." Hardy is among good company. The critics largely thought it was an empty film, and it was rejected by the Academy to even be considered as a nominee for Foreign Film.Roger Ebert is more positive, including it as one of his Great Movies. And he is right. Alongside "Holy Mountain", Jodorowsky creates a world that must be seen to be believed. Maybe it can not all be understood and maybe it is not meant to be understood, but he was making beautiful and strange films years before the modern masters (e.g. Lynch) even got started.

Leofwine_draca Yeah, I didn't think much of this surrealist western, even though I was prepared to like it and WANTED to like it was I watched. By the end I couldn't help but feel it's another case of "the emperor's new clothes" in terms of style over substance, and the sum of the whole ending up much less than the individual parts.The story starts out straightforward enough, with a distinctive gunslinger discovering the aftermath of a massacre and vowing to take revenge on the outlaws responsible. Once that story is out of the way, though, it starts getting weirder and weirder, almost existentialist, as the gunslinger has encounters with a series of deity-like characters in the desert and undergoes a religiously significant transformation. By the end, I was quite frankly bored.Here's the good stuff: Jodorowsky's cinematography, which is glorious. EL TOPO is vibrant-looking and colourful throughout, and I love the use of surreal imagery which really works. There are poignant scenes and flashes of Peckinpah-style ultra-violence and the contrasting elements are mixed together well. It's just the script, really, which lets it down, becoming too abstract; I always prefer a more concrete narrative as a basis on which to pin the more fantastic elements, but EL TOPO is lacking such a construct and at times just seems to be being made up as it goes along.

Jackson Booth-Millard This Spanish language film I spotted because it was featured in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I wasn't sure what I would make of it before I watched, but I am glad I did. Basically El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky, also writing and directing) is the cowboy riding his horse with his naked six year old son riding with him, and they are burying childhood photos and objects in the desert sand to make the boy a man. Journeying back they come across a massacre of blood and bodies, all killed by bandits, and deciding he is something of a God he decides he should get revenge for these people, including killing the fat bald Colonel. After leaving his son in the care of some monks, El Topo rides off with Mara (Mara Lorenzio) whom the Colonel kept as a slave, and she encourages him to kill four guns-men to be the greatest in the land, but he ends up feeling guilty afterwards. After being shot by another woman and Mara abandoning him he is dragged away by some dwarfs and mutants, and years later he is in a cave full of deformed outcasts who have made him their God. They only have one way out of the cave, and El Topo decides to help them escape, and he also forms a lover relationship with a dwarf girl, and then he wants money for dynamite. El Topo's grown up son finds him and threatens to kill him for abandoning him, but after he allows the outcasts to get out, and he succeeds in creating an exit that all the people flood out of. In the end he does gets some mortal wounds from the cultists, but he ignores these and sees his girlfriend give birth, only to die and go into a grave covered in a beehive, and El Topo's son, the girlfriend and the baby ride away. I will be honest, the story is rather complicated and anyone including may get confused and not understand, most of it is a collection of bizarre images, ideas and situations. This is called the cult film fan's cult film, I can certainly see that it won't be to everyone's taste, but it is certainly in many ways near essential viewings, if you are one for films with a lot of blood and weirdness, then this is for you, a good surreal spaghetti western. Worth watching!

Billy_Crash I usually love the avant-garde, the offbeat, the strange and the surreal. Being a fan of David Lynch, Takashi Miike and Terry Gilliam, bring me the weird and bizarre – but do not bring me "El Topo". This midnite movie cult classic is one of those films I had been told was a "must see", though I knew it was not that easy. Most viewers either love or hate the movie with no in between. Jodorowsky delivered as writer/director/actor/composer a mixed bag of metaphor, allegory, imagery, spaghetti western, fantasy, horror and utter gore, weighed down with Buddhism and Christianity, and just about anything else from the philosophical and metaphysical kitchen sink. The aforementioned is fine, but when the final destination for the audience is nowhere, I can understand the passionate hatred from those who despise the film. Of its lovers, many told me it was "trippy" and they simply liked it because of that.The narrative, however, is all over the place as El Topo (The Mole) travels the Mexican desert to face and kill The Four Masters of the Desert. Do they represent the Four Horsemen, the Four Winds, the Four Elements? It is anybody's guess. The movie is so loaded with imagery upon imagery it is as if Jodorowsky was purposefully stirring the pot just to keep people guessing. Maybe as lovers of the film try to decipher the layers of meaning, Jodorowsky is laughing somewhere. This film did not satisfy me on any level because the result was a pile of primordial ooze that did not have time to gel into something coherent. Granted, I was intrigued by Topo's Zen-like transformation, especially when he worked so diligently to save the deformed cripples, but this was not enough to justify what came beforehand.The movie is a circus sideshow with bits and pieces that are at times amusing while disgusting on other occasions. In this vein, Jodorowsky delivered the grotesque on a tortilla. At times both ridiculous and frightening, he shocks the audience with a stream of phantasmagorical scenes that lead only to the end credits and nothing more. Whatever Jodorowsky was searching for, it was for him and him alone. The movie was self- indulgent and left me amazingly disappointed.I can sit and discuss Lynch's disturbing "Eraserhead", Miike's over-the-top "Visitor Q" and Gilliam's Orwellian "Brasil", but Jodorowsky's work leads to a dead end because it is utterly nonsensical.