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UnowPriceless hyped garbage

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

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.

Jugu Abraham I am a great admirer of directors/scriptwriters who understand religious works before they make films that refer to religion (e.g., Kieslowsky, Tarkovsky, Mallick, Reygadas, Bunuel, Bergman, Dreyer, etc.). Jodorowsky, in this film, proved that he neither knew Christian scriptures nor Buddhist philosophy. The only detail that showed some scholarship was the discussion on the Jewish name Marah. Jodorowsky was trying to be very erudite in calling sections of the film (a) genesis (b) the prophets (c) the psalms and (d) the apocalypse. While the first and the last section have some remote connection to the Bible, the screenplay proves Jodorowsky's total lack of knowledge to either parody or discuss the similarities with the narratives of his screenplay. What did Jodowsky's psalms have that related to/or referred even obliquely to the Psalms of David?His knowledge of the Oriental scriptures is equally muddled--one savant seems to be fascinated with Egyptology, building pyramids with sticks and having a man with no arms carrying another without any feet. Some have called the work surrealist--it would be that only if Jodorowsky had showed a glimpse of scholarship beyond the etymology of Marah. Even blood splattered walls do not look authentic, nor do visuals of pigs rushing out of an empty place of worship. This is immature cinema--Hollywood's "Freaks" was far superior in content and so was Bunuel's surrealist works that criticized organized religion.

billcr12 El Topo looks like an early cut of a David Lynch project. The title character is also the director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who at the beginning, looks like Zorro, dressed in black, riding a horse with his naked young son on board trekking through the desert of Mexico. They come across a group of dead bodies and the Latino Dirty Harry finds the perpetrators and kills them all, including their leader, the colonel, whose slave he rescues and names Mara. He leaves his kid at a mission and begins a quest to defeat four great gunmen. He conquers all of them, but feels guilty and throws away his weapons to seek a more peaceful life. Mara leaves him after he is shot down and then carried off by dwarfs and other odd people. El Topo wakes up in a cave with the strange assortment of freaks worshiping him as a deity. He meets a midget woman and they become lovers. She becomes pregnant and he puts together a plan to escape from the cave. By the time the movie ends, I was not impressed with the bad acting or horrendous script; avoid El Topo at all costs.

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.