The Holy Mountian (1973)

It's hard to even know where to being with this movie, The Holy Mountain is so odd, and I've seen a good number of odd movies. I might even go so far as to say The Holy Mountain is the strangest movie I've ever seen. I had seen its director Alejandro Jodorowsky's other famous movie before, El Topo, and while extremely strange that movie had something resembling a conventional plot, The Holy Mountain does not. Now many weird films will introduce their distinctive and unusual elements early on and you'll have a chance to get used to it, while The Holy Mountain keeps upping its game throughout, introduces more and more odd ideas over the course of the film so you can never quite get a handle on the proceedings. Some of the promotional material for the film heralds it as beyond our traditional concepts of film criticism and I'd have to agree, I don't know how to approach it or how to rank or rate it. It is at times unpleasant, at times fascinating, calling the movie 'good' or 'bad' wouldn't really seem to do it justice. I may have to revisit this one some time down the road but for now on a 4 star scale I'd have to give a ?