El Topo

El Topo or, Holy God, Why Did I Agree To This?

Attacking El Topo for being pretentious is like attacking Macbooks for having only one mouse button: a must.

Positive reviews of this film will tend to have words like "hypnotic", "mystical", "allegorical", "trance", and other vague descriptions that attempt to hide the fact that no, they didn't get the film either, and neither did Jodorowsky.

OK, there's a cowboy, a naked boy, a quest to defeat the master gunmen or whatever (which the cowboy does by cheating), a crucifixion (you knew there had to be one at some point), a town of the deformed .. well, you get the idea. The main story is something like this: drifter exacts revenge for a massacred people, wanders into the desert to become the Best Gunman, ends up becoming the object of worship for a group of deformed people in a cavern, and decides to fund a tunnel connecting them to the nearest town by (Franciscan) busking.

* * * R A T I N G * * *

El Topo (IMDB)

Wince : [***__]
Flinch : [**___]
Retch : [**___]
Gape : [***__]

Beerequisite : [***__]
Pornability : [**___]
Obscurity : [*____]
Explicability : [*____]

Best viewing method: Slam a few beers and find a midnight showing close to a university with a decent film school (in this case, NYU). You'll be the only person in the theater laughing until the students finally realize that no, it's not genius filmmaking and no, they shouldn't be taking this shit seriously either.