Review of El Topo (1970) by Jonathan F — 22 Jun 2008
I really expected to not like this movie. Iâ??ve been hearing about it as a cult movie for the past few years, and thought that I should give it a try. I thought it was going to be a â??weird for the sake of weirdâ?? movie with bad production values, but it turned out to be quite a stunning experience.
Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean film director of many other talents, has cornered the market on Surrealist Mexican Westerns with this. The imagery in the movie is along the lines of Fellini, with religious themes and other tableaus giving insight into the characters and setting.
The movie starts out with the main character, El Topo (Spanish for the Mole) wandering the Mexican desert in search for enlightenment with his son. Along the way he saves some Monks from a marauding band and leaves his son with them.
He then has a series of fights with 4 gun masters, each with a unique ability, along the lines of a karate movie. The first of the gun masters is a blind mystic who has the ability to make bullets pass through his body, and is served by a team of two men; one with no arms and one with no legs operating as a single unit.
Then things start to get weirdâ?¦After going through the next 3 gun masters, he finds his way to an underground world populated by deformed people after nearly dying. He becomes a completely new person over the course of years through mediation, and decides to help the â??mole peopleâ?? reenter the normal world.
He goes about disguised as a kind of performing monk with his midget female companion, entering into conflict with a cult that has dominated the town he performs in, a conflict which takes up the rest of the movie.
One of the amazing aspects of this movie for me, beyond the visuals and excellent fight scenes, was the ability of Jodorowsky to portray violence in a realistic horrific manner, as opposed to the usual format of Westerns which portrays violence in a cartoonish way.
Definitely not for everybody, but a treat for those with a taste for something different.
This review of El Topo (1970) was written by Jonathan F on 22 Jun 2008.
El Topo has generally received positive reviews.
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