El Topo - English subtitled
Surrealist-comic and extremely gory cult classic from Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky about a gunslinger on a revenge mission.
‘Most filmmakers make films with their eyes; I make them with my balls,’ Jodorowsky once observed. The psychedelic spaghetti western EL TOPO is a good illustration of that statement. In Jodorowsky’s most violent and infamous film, the director himself plays El Topo, a gunslinger dressed in black who claims to be God. In the company of his son, he travels across the desert on his way to a duel with sharp-shooting Zen masters. After this duel, EL TOPO really goes wild, and we get caught up in a perverse and radical stream of images full of massacres and physical and mental depravity.
EL TOPO has many famous fans, from John Lennon and Yoko Ono to David Lynch, Peter Gabriel, Bob Dylan and Dennis Hopper. Thanks to the support of Lennon and Ono, Jodorowsky became a hero in the counterculture movement of the 1970s. EL TOPO set off a new trend (initially only in New York, later in other American cities): the midnight movie. Intoxicated night owls populated movie theatres at midnight to watch unconventional, non-mainstream films.