El Topo (1970)
Review by the Fiend of Grue
Have you ever sat down and watched a film and wondered just what in the hell you were watching, not because it was bad, but because it was unlike anything you had ever witnessed or knew existed? You liked what you were seeing but weren’t quite sure why and you also weren’t quite sure where the film was going to go next because there was simply nothing else in your experiences to compare it too? Well, that is what was rolling through my head time and again as I watched Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo.
The movie begins with showing our lead character El Topo (played by Alejandro Jodorowsky himself) and his son ( real life son Brontis Jodorowsky ) riding on a horse through the desert and they stop when they come to a wooden pole in the middle of nowhere. El Topo tells the naked boy that he is 7 years old now and he is a man then he has him bury a picture of his mom and his first toy in the sand.
From there, the two of them ride into a village where a massive slaughter has taken place. There’s a woman impaled on a huge spike, bodies scattered everywhere, disemboweled horses, a whole church congregation that has committed suicide and literally pools of blood all over the place. The lone survivor of this whole mess begs for El Topo to kill him so he gives his son his gun and has him do it.
It doesn’t take long for El Topo to find out it was the Colonel (David Silva) and his men that did the dastardly deed in the village. The Colonel’s henchmen are busy tormenting the monk survivors while the Colonel has his way with a woman named Mara (Mara Lorenzio) but as El Topo rides in, he grabs the Colonel and publicly humiliates him. Eventually even his men help dispose of him.
After disposing of the nasty Colonel and setting the monks free, El Topo leaves his son with them for guidance and he a Mara ride off together. The two of them set out on the harsh and barren landscapes of the desert in search of enlightenment and the pursuit of God. While doing so, El Topo professes his love for Mara to which she says she cannot return the love until he proves he is the best. She then tells of “four gun masters that live in the desert. You must kill them for me to love you,” or so she says. El Topo then explains how the desert is in a circle so to find these four men they must travel in a spiral until reaching the center.
El Topo finds each man, but as another strange woman comes into the mix, his beloved Mara has a change of heart that sets his course on an entirely different path. Left for dead, El Topo is found by a group of incest-deformed people who care for him for many years before he reawakens. When he does, he is confronted with a whole new obstacle of helping these people dig a hole so they can escape this cave they have been prisoners of for years, but in the town below is a ruthless sheriff and a horde of religious wackos who put the people in the cave to begin with. Can El Topo live up to the tasks at hand or will this impossible mission be too much for him to endure?
El Topo is one of those types of movies that you watch that truly has the ability to change you, if not change you, definitely shake you into a different reality. Through most of the film, it gives you a sense that nothing is too big to overcome, no task is too much and no mountain is too high to conquer. As El Topo goes through these impossible missions and faces these seemingly immortal foes he becomes more and more enlightened with each victory and you almost feel enlightened right along with him. As his search for God continues, he is taken down paths that you wouldn’t expect to see come his way. As he succeeds in these obstacles laid out before him, his situation with Mara deteriorates and he almost dies. When he awakens in the cave with the deformed people, there is a noticeable difference in him, not so much because of his looks, which are different too, but more in just the way he carries himself. He still has his resolve, but his mind is not quite where it used to be, it’s almost like everything he’s went through has nearly pushed him over the edge of sanity.
Alejandro does a great job as El Topo. You feel his pain, his anguish and his salvation as he searches for God and Alejandro could not be better at making the part believable. The trials and tribulations that this man go through are enormous and the story went further than I expected and in different directions than I expected. Mara Lorenzio as Mara is very good to as a woman who becomes someone else to get her way. Really, all the performances across the board in this movie were very good with no real weak spots, no matter how large or small they were.
I’ve always heard how controversial this movie was and after seeing it, it is easy to see why. Just the opening scene alone of showing an entire church congregation that has hung themselves right in the middle of the church is enough to stir up many religious people, but then you’ve got a field full of dead rabbits, that appears to be very real, a crucified goat, and many stabs at the Christian religion in general throughout the film. Not only that, but there are several real deformed people in this movie that you won’t soon forget and many other shocking scenes and images that you just have to see for yourself. One I will tell you about is when El Topo is walking up to a building and you see a man approaching him that looks like one man, but as he gets closer you see that it is a legless man strapped to an armless man. You’ll surely do a double take like I did upon seeing this sight. I guess two are better than one though.
The movie is 124 minutes long and never was I bored, but was rather wondering what I was going to see next. Being split up into four sections (Genesis, The Prophets, Psalms and Apocalypse) this movie only continues to get more and more strange as it goes along. Like the line that El Topo said earlier in the film about them going in a spiral to the center of the desert, you feel like you’re going in a spiral of some different existence where bizarre is the norm. These people in this desert must love the peyote, because they sure are nutty.
El Topo is the type of film that will grab you and reel you in with one viewing, but will take several times watching it before you can fully wrap your head around all of its symbolic meanings and allegorical musings. I’ve only seen it this one time, but I will say there is no way you can take it all in the first time, there’s just too much going on, too much to think about and like I said, this is like no movie you will ever see, that’s for damn sure. This is not only one of the strangest films I have ever seen, but equally one of the best. There is such a vast range of emotions that I felt while watching this movie – hope, despair, coupled with some laughs, some frowns and then spiced up with feelings of revolt, surrealism and finished up with a healthy dash of empowerment.
El Topo is a movie that was originally released in 1970 and just last year saw it’s first official DVD release though Anchor Bay in the form of “The Films Of Alejandro Jodorowsky” box set, that also includes The Holy Mountain, Fando Y Lis (I will be reviewing all of these in the near future along with one other Jodorowsky film called Santa Sangre). This movie is supposedly the one that single-handedly started the “Midnight Movie” phenomenon that became the alternative to Hollywood’s mainstream fare. It’s easy to see why this movie has endured an audience and hopefully with this new release, the fan base will only grow. This was a refreshing movie to me, totally different from anything I have ever seen. Not a horror movie by any stretch, it’s more like an avant-garde, quasi-western, but I think the reason the horror community has embraced this film and other Jodorowsky films is for the sheer strangeness of the whole thing, plus El Topo has plenty of gory bloodshed to go around.
In closing I’ll say this movie isn’t going to be for everyone, not because it’s too disturbing, but because it is a different beast all together. If you are in for a movie that is gonna put you to the test, challenge all that you know and empower you in the process, then check out El Topo…I highly recommend it!
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