Director Alejandro Jodorowsky's films ride the same wavelength as David Lynch films. They are wild, weird and unlike anything you have ever seen or can attempt to understand. He has been called a visionary, an artist, and a madman. His bizarre visuals and his unique filmmaking vision have made him not only a favorite of midnight movie fans, but a lynchpin in the world of experimental cinema. El Topo is the first of his films that I have seen, and despite some absurd elements, it plays out like a revisionist western with the violence turned up to 10, at least for the first hour that is.

Jodorowsky himself plays El Topo, a badass spaghetti western styled cowboy dressed in black leather. He travels the desert with his buck naked son, who is played by Jodorowsky's real son Brontis, and gets into gunfights. His first stop is at a village where not only have all the inhabitants (children included) been slaughtered, but the horses have been gutted as well. He follows the trail of the five men responsible and gets into a fight along the way with a trio of bandits. He blows the faces off of two of them and then delivers the most amazing kneecap wound I have ever seen to the third guy, who he pumps for information. The dying bandit informs him that the five men are holed up in a small town nearby and when he gets there he sees four of the guys sexually molesting the young monks. Topo lays the smackdown as they say and carves the balls off of their leader, who paints his face like a woman, and has the town execute the four other bandits. The only woman in town, who had become a slave to the bandits, falls in love with E.T. and he decides to take her along with him instead of his son. He kicks his son in the face and rides off with the woman, leaving his naked son to be raised as a monk. So begins a boring sequence where E.T. and the girl are walking around the desert looking for water. They find some and he decides to call her Mara because she is "like bitter water".....? She mentions one day that she doesn't love him because there are four other masters of the revolver in the desert and until E.T. has conquered them, she cannot love him. This is around the time where I would have kicked that bitch to the curb, but E.T. decides to make her love him and to find the four masters.

The first master is guarded by a guy with no legs strapped to a guy with no arms, but it seems as if he could take care of himself. He lives in a strange tower and is basically a Hindu guy who has meditated so much or whatever that he can no longer feel pain or bleed that much when he gets shot. They square off and E.T. gets lucky when the Hindu guy falls in a hole, giving him enough time to blow the guys face off. The next master is a fat Russian guy, who has practiced so much he can shoot precisely around objects of any size. E.T. manages to get the drop on this guy and his gypsy mom, but he had to pull a dirty trick to get the upper hand. The third master runs a bunny farm and is easily defeated, then buried in a mound of dead rabbits. The forth guy is an old guy who shoots himself to prove that death is nothing to fear. You'd think he'd be happy now, and you'd think the movie was over, but that's only about 70 minutes of this 120 minute epic. He begins to feel terrible about what he's done and is shot down without warning by Mara and this other girl they picked up along the way. They leave him for dead and he is picked up by a bunch of freaky-deaky cripples and midgets. About oh say twenty years later he wakes up in this cave and has become the leader and defender of the freaky-deakies.

The second half of the film gets really, really boring. Sure there are some weird things, but the film stops being about a wandering gunfighter and becomes about nothing interesting at all. He promises his loyal freaks that he will venture out of the cave they are trapped in and dig them out so they can finally exit into the real world. He takes a midget girl with him as company. They quickly realize that the only way to get money to buy tools and dynamite to manage the dig is to beg for it in the nearest town, Cochise, which is a rundown, depressing place. So the film becomes an absurd version of La Strada with E.T. and the Midge (I patented that name if it ever becomes a sitcom) performing various retarded acts of mime. The townspeople seem to like it and they start making money. I am going to skip over a lot of bizarro stuff here that does not affect the plot, which is the main reason this last half ruins the movie, and get to the end. One of the monks in the town happens to be E.T.'s son, all grown up now. He wants to kills his dad for leaving him behind, but he promises to wait until the tunnel is dug. In the meantime, E.T. and the Midge get nasty and she gets pregnant. In the end, the tunnel is dug but the damn freaks are ungrateful and rush past E.T. without a thanks. They end up getting mowed down by the equally freakish townspeople of Cochise. E.T. grabs a gun and calls upon his earlier gift to kill everyone in town, and this scene was not nearly as cool as it should have been. In the end, he decides to set himself on fire because....well, I have no idea why, but he does it, leaving the Midge and his new baby without a father. On his grave, his son lays slabs of honeycomb and the bees that come with it for some reason. Perhaps his life was truly only sweet in death?

I really thought this would be a red death coffin for sure, because I hate weird-for-weirdness-sake movies with a passion. But I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. The first hour to 70 minutes is fantastic. Jodorowsky's unique vision of a western is at times frustrating, but rewarding in its ballsy attitude. When they hit the town of Cochise, sadly a solid hour, becomes boring and pretentious, causing this critic to lose interest in the film and its characters very quickly and causing the film to lose at least two coffins. But maybe the film was just too weird to stay on a linear path, and that's probably where it failed. It was just too damn long for no good reason. If it had ended at the 70 min. mark, it would have been masterful, despite the naked kid in the beginning, but I just can't stop harping on how awful the second half was. Never mind that it was chock full of weird shit (fat, old whores tormenting a slave, a gay sheriff and deputy, a Russian Roulette church ceremony), it was the fact that none of it made sense and became superfluous to the film. This is not really a western for western fan. It's a western for people who liked Inland Empire. If you've seen it, then you know in which category you're in.

- Jose Prendes