El Topo (1970)

Sam Peckinpah meets Siddhartha. Alejandro Jodorowsky's Spanish language film (the title translates as "The Mole") achieved notoriety after cinema owners started showing it at night after their regular schedule of films, becoming in effect the first midnight movie. Other then actually seeing it nothing communicates the oddity of this film better then a description of its plot, so *SPOILERS* I leave you with its Wikipedia summery:


The film takes place in two parts. The first half resembles a western; albeit a surreal one. The second is a love story of redemption and rebirth.

Part 1

The first half opens with El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) traveling through a desert on horseback with his naked young son. They come across a town whose inhabitants have been slaughtered, and El Topo hunts down and kills the perpetrators and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel had kept as a slave. El Topo names the woman Mara, and she convinces him to defeat four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land. Each gun master represents a particular religion or philosophy, and El Topo learns from each of them before instigating a duel. El Topo is victorious each time, not through superior skill but through trickery or luck.

After the first duel, a black-clad woman with a male voice finds the couple and guides them to the remaining gun masters. As he kills each master, El Topo has increasing doubts about his mission, but Mara persuades him to continue. Having killed all four, El Topo is ridden with guilt, destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed those masters, finding their graves swarming with bees. The unnamed woman confronts El Topo and shoots him multiple times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then betrays him and rides off with the woman, while El Topo collapses and is carried away by a group of dwarves and mutants.

Part 2

The second half of the film takes place years later. El Topo awakes in a cave, to find that the tribe of deformed outcasts have taken care of him and set him up as a God-like figure, while he has been asleep and meditating on the gun masters' "four lessons". The outcasts dwell in a system of caves which have been blocked in — the only exit is out of their reach due to their deformities. When El Topo awakes, he is "born again" and decides to help the outcasts escape. He is able to reach the exit and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighbouring town to raise money for dynamite.

A young monk arrives in the town to be the new priest, but is disgusted by the perverted form of religion the cultists practice. He also discovers that El Topo is his father, who had abandoned him to the mission. He threatens to kill El Topo, but agrees to wait until he has succeeded in freeing the outcasts.

With the help of his now-pregnant girlfriend and son, El Topo creates a new exit from the cave. The outcasts come streaming out, but as they enter the town they are shot down by the cultists.

El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being slaughtered and is shot himself. Ignoring his own wounds he massacres the cultists, then takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. His girlfriend gives birth at the same time as his death, and she and his son make a grave for his remains. This becomes a beehive like the gun masters' graves.

As the film ends, El Topo's son, girlfriend and baby ride off on horseback, the son now wearing his father's clothes.

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