El Topo (1970)

El Topo (NR) - Review

"The desert before the Mountain"

What Alejandro Jodorowsky finished with Holy Mountain he started in El Topo.  A viscerally savage western/metaphor, you get out of the film what you bring into it.  Without the better preproduction and art design of its younger film brother Mountian, El Topo focuses more more heavily on violence, both real and imaginary.  Some scenes can almost be seen as an anti-American reaction to Sam Peckinpah's slow motion carnage in The Wild Bunch, both spirtually and sarcastically.  El Topo misses more than it hits, but who can guess what it was actually aiming for?

5.5 Hysterical Laughing out of 10 (MEDIOCRE)