by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Alejandro Jodorowsky
CAST: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky, Mara Lorenzio, Paula Romo
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 80% Certified Fresh
PLOT: A mysterious black-clad gunfighter wanders a mystical Western landscape encountering multiple bizarre characters. (THERE’S an understatement.)
Having only seen one other film from Alejandro Jodorowsky (Santa Sangre, 1989), I thought I was prepared for El Topo. I mean, how weird could it be after watching a movie featuring a funeral for an elephant and an armless serial killer who murders by proxy via her son’s hands? In my review of Santa Sangre, I used words like “fever dream” and “raw emotional power” and “phantasmagorical imagery.”
Now, thinking about El Topo, different words come to mind, but not necessarily in a negative way. “Demented.” “Over the top.” “Cryptic.” Here is a movie that does for Westerns what Quentin Tarantino did for kung-fu, but through a hallucinogenic filter. Indeed, at the time of its release, it was dubbed the first “acid Western.” I leave it to more educated cinephiles than I to tell us if there was a second.
Right from the opening, Jodorowsky lets us know we’re in for something different. A black-clad gunslinger, El Topo (“The Mole”) rides his horse out of the desert accompanied by a naked boy. He dismounts and tells the boy to bury a teddy bear and a woman’s photo. “You are seven years old. You are a man. Bury your first toy and your mother’s picture.” They ride off, and thus begins an epic quest as El Topo searches for four gunfighting masters, seeking to defeat them in single combat. But first he must liberate an unnamed woman from the clutches of an uncultured colonel and his four lackies, who have laid waste to an entire town…
Since this is basically the second grand image of the film, I feel justified in going on about a little bit. The town is a literal bloodbath. One body is impaled near the top of what looks like a telephone pole. The main street is dotted with pools of blood, and I don’t mean little puddles. Bodies of villagers lie alongside the corpses of disemboweled horses. One survivor crawls up to El Topo and begs to be put out of his misery. El Topo draws his gun…and hands it to the boy instead.
Put off yet? This movie should come with “trigger warnings.” Suicide, disfigurement, sexual assault (with female AND male victims), nudity, animal cruelty, child endangerment, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting. The last time I watched a movie with this much controversial content (The Last House on the Left, 1972), I was left with a bad taste in my mouth. This time, with El Topo, I felt there were parts of it that I could have done without, but I also felt a sneaky admiration that some lunatic was able to get this all on film, and not only did it succeed, but it became a legendary cult classic.
I can understand that, without being an outright fan of the film. I mean, the whole movie is nothing but a series of WTF moments. I haven’t even touched on the second woman encountered in the desert, or the colony of rabbits that starts dying spontaneously when El Topo arrives (some of them for real, it looks like), or the fortune teller with the live lion chained to her wagon, or the community of little and differently-abled people trapped inside an underground system of caves (“We are deformed, from the continuous incest”).
I would put El Topo in the same family as John Waters’ Pink Flamingos or Lynch’s Eraserhead, a cult classic that sort of dares you to watch, just so you can say you did it. Like Santa Sangre, it’s full of unique imagery that you just won’t find anywhere else. And, also like Santa Sangre, any deeper meanings to the story or either there for the gleaning, or it could just all be an acid trip. I would accept either interpretation.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 