Author: Unknown
•2:50 PM
By Jaclyn Mckee

El Topo is really a truly one of a kind western film, completely unlike anything you've seen before. It's hard to know where to begin. Next time you want to watch movies online, just give El Topo a try and see what you think.

The movie follows El Topo, a black hat gunfighter who goes out with his young son to avenge the death of the mother. As the movie opens, El Topo has his son bury a picture of the mother, symbolically saying goodbye to his childhood and becoming a man. The two travel across the desert on horseback in search of vengeance.

Upon attaining their revenge, the man and child go separate ways. The man leaves the boy in the care of a church while he leaves with his new lover. Here the movie takes a dramatic turn towards a new story development. The woman wants El Topo to kill the four fastest killers in the desert before she can love him, since she refuses to be with anyone but the strongest. They wander for ten years seeking the men out and killing them one by one.

The four killers are each fascinating characters. There's one whose assistants are a man with no legs sitting on the shoulders of a man with no arms. Another is burly, strong man who is so incredibly strong and so incredibly in control of that strength that it allows him to build incredibly delicate, fragile structures and objects out of toothpicks, these objects which Topo cannot touch without destroying. The final master is an old man who uses a butterfly net to deflect bullets.

After being betrayed by his lover, El Topo goes into a coma for several years, sleeping in the heart of a mountain, a cocoon of sorts, as he will eventually be reborn as a savior. He dons a priestly robe and shaves his head and attempts to redeem himself, but must first find the same forgiveness in his heart that he seeks from the world.

El Topo reunites with his now-adult son, who has found that the life of a holy man comes with just as many difficulties as the life of a gun fighter. Life is full of difficulties and violence no matter who you are.

The film touches on symbolism from just about every major religion in the history of mankind, from Buddhism to Catholicism to Hinduism. The end result is a film where the symbolism is really an all new beast, in a sense. Because the symbolism draws from so many sources, it's impossible for anybody but the film's director to understand them completely, so it really winds up feeling like a whole new religious background invented from the ground up.

El Topo is perhaps one of the most surreal and strange films of any genre. It will, all at once, shock you and uplift you, repulse and enlighten you, and it will leave you feeling positive, confused, and curious. It's a rare film that asks more questions of the universe than it is capable of answering. Jodorowsky has always been one of the strangest directors of all time, and this may just be his crowning masterpiece.

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