This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

Goods: Like literally everything is good. El Topo is one experience beyond comprehension that will confuse you and make you feel stupid, but not completely, because you can tie it in with certain themes and really vibe with it.Not so goods: Ehhhh not really anything, but if the wrong person watches this they'd get pretty disturbed.

There's a fine line between surrealistic entertainment & absolute repulsion in Alejandro Jodorowsky's classic. It's a line that is very blurry. Jodorowsky wrote, directed and stars as a gunslinger who takes on the four best sharpshooters around. He succeeds...or does he? The film is not a western in any traditional sense, but is instead an outrageous head trip full of A LOT of blood, a lot of bible inspired mysticism and a fair amount of gratuitous nudity. Jodorowsky, looking very Christ-like, has barely any dialog (and neither does anyone else), but somehow this nightmare of a film moves along quickly. The production values are outstanding. It's stunningly photographed with great editing. The film is populated with perhaps one freak too many -- one's eyes get exhausted at some of the sights. You will, however, never see anything like this.

I've been wanting to see this movie ever since I first heard that it was played only after midnight at the Elgin. I finally got my chance the other night, ... and it was excellent, beautiful, grotesque, violent, inspiring, haunting, gritty, meaningful, symbolic, bloody, light, dark, and simply amazing. I don't get the criticism I read and hear a lot about this film, I absolutely love it! If you haven't seen this masterpiece, do not watch it unless you're alone.(Unless you absolutely know the people or person you watch it with would be quiet so you have the chance to see this with an open mind and absorb it in it's entirety hence this film is definitely not for everyone.) So, after that introduction on why I love this film and why it's probably one of the best films to date, I'll write my review the only way one possibly could write a review for El Topo...for those who have seen it and for those who have not......Watch it.

I usually love the avant-garde, the offbeat, the strange and the surreal. Being a fan of David Lynch, Takashi Miike and Terry Gilliam, bring me the weird and bizarre – but do not bring me "El Topo". This midnite movie cult classic is one of those films I had been told was a "must see", though I knew it was not that easy. Most viewers either love or hate the movie with no in between. Jodorowsky delivered as writer/director/actor/composer a mixed bag of metaphor, allegory, imagery, spaghetti western, fantasy, horror and utter gore, weighed down with Buddhism and Christianity, and just about anything else from the philosophical and metaphysical kitchen sink. The aforementioned is fine, but when the final destination for the audience is nowhere, I can understand the passionate hatred from those who despise the film. Of its lovers, many told me it was "trippy" and they simply liked it because of that.The narrative, however, is all over the place as El Topo (The Mole) travels the Mexican desert to face and kill The Four Masters of the Desert. Do they represent the Four Horsemen, the Four Winds, the Four Elements? It is anybody's guess. The movie is so loaded with imagery upon imagery it is as if Jodorowsky was purposefully stirring the pot just to keep people guessing. Maybe as lovers of the film try to decipher the layers of meaning, Jodorowsky is laughing somewhere. This film did not satisfy me on any level because the result was a pile of primordial ooze that did not have time to gel into something coherent. Granted, I was intrigued by Topo's Zen-like transformation, especially when he worked so diligently to save the deformed cripples, but this was not enough to justify what came beforehand.The movie is a circus sideshow with bits and pieces that are at times amusing while disgusting on other occasions. In this vein, Jodorowsky delivered the grotesque on a tortilla. At times both ridiculous and frightening, he shocks the audience with a stream of phantasmagorical scenes that lead only to the end credits and nothing more. Whatever Jodorowsky was searching for, it was for him and him alone. The movie was self- indulgent and left me amazingly disappointed.I can sit and discuss Lynch's disturbing "Eraserhead", Miike's over-the-top "Visitor Q" and Gilliam's Orwellian "Brasil", but Jodorowsky's work leads to a dead end because it is utterly nonsensical.