El Topo (1970): B

A hodgepodge of hallucinatory symbolic nonsensicality, El Topo has lost little of the maddening, bewildering weirdness that made it a seminal midnight-movie phenomenon. A cult reputation seems fitting for a film made by a mind seemingly warped by religious nuttiness, with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s saga operating as a Christianity-infatuated spaghetti Western spoof that gleefully frustrates literal, logical interpretation. Every image invites several interpretations, from the nudity of gunslinger El Topo’s (Jodorowsky) sidekick son, to the bloody, sadomasochistic lesbianism of his female compatriots, to four gun masters that he slays along his journey, to – finally – the orgy in which El Topo partakes (his underwear marked with a red heart) with a cave-dwelling little person. New Testament allusions are front and center throughout the film’s first half, in which Jodorowsky is a man-in-black cowboy badass, while unhinged genre strangeness is the calling card of the later action, in which he’s a bald-headed fool, and which culminates with an outrageous church gathering in which miracles are received via games of Russian Roulette. It’s a freak show nightmare acid trip unconstrained by boundaries of lucidity or good taste, a rambling trip across a psychedelic carnival wasteland of innocents and degenerates. Though its lack of clarity can make its anything-goes story occasionally feel like a self-indulgent drag more than a slice of oater-inspired Buñuelian surrealism, there’s no denying El Topo’s out-there uniqueness.