Skewering organized religion, consumerism, and both American peace-and-love hippiedom and militarism via a surreal search for spiritual enlightenment, The Holy Mountain is a rainbow-hued phantasmagoria of Dali-esque dementia. Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film is at once more lucid and batshit insane than his prior cult classic El Topo, making its social satire more overt and yet streaking off on bizarre narrative and visual/aural tangents. The story concerns a Christ-like Thief (Horacio Salinas) who rises from the dead, hangs out with an armless and legless fellow, and then joins forces with The Alchemist (Jodorowsky) – who lives in the pinwheel-colored penthouse of a red rectangular structure – and his eight other disciples (each one hailing from a different planet) to conquer the titular mountain and its resident immortals. Shaved heads, castrations, egg-shaped sweat chambers and the destruction of religious idols are merely a few of the innumerable strange sights on display throughout this trippy head-scratcher, which functions as an attempt at communion with the divine even as it barrels forward with no-holds-barred craziness. Jodorowsky’s symbolism-overloaded tableaus of pig guts, spraying blood and ejaculate, animal carcasses and human nudity beg for literal analysis and yet are most effective as sprawling, disjointed dream-state fragments, part of a rambling stream-of-consciousness quest that – in its final, self-conscious act – celebrates the primacy of the filmed image.
This film currently holds the record as the strangest thing I've ever seen on film.
I remember a particular scene where a man with tiger-heads for breasts was spraying milk about quite liberally and feeling totally perplexed about what on earth was going on, but unable to look away.
If you've seen anything stranger I'd be interested to hear about it :)
Posted by: GSP | June 14, 2011 at 08:54 PM