El Monstroso

Surely the most nausea-inducing flick in town is El Topo (The Mole), made by and starring the Chilean-Russian, Mexican-born Alexandro Jodorowsky. Señor Jodorowsky is brilliantly creative, a south-of-the-border Fellini. He is also, if this is conceivable, even more pretentious than the Fellini of Satyricon. Sr. Jodorowsky’s film, which the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael aptly labeled a “head film,” tells, sort of, about an avenger dressed in black cowboy drag, riding with his naked seven-year-old son into the Mexican desert for a rite de passage. After which, they happen upon a village drowning in the blood of all its people and beasts, who have been hideously slain by four comic (sic) bandits. El Topo and Son track down the villians, who’ve been annihilating another town and sodomizing the young priests, there dispatching the top-bandit by castration and leaving his lieutenants to the villagers’ ingenuity.

Abandoning the boy with the words, “Never trust anybody,” El Topo rides off with the head bandit’s woman in due course slaughtering four desert holy men in four elaborate, nearly unendurable scenes of trickery and savagery. Our Hero is then murdered by a gorgeous dyke who has joined him and his woman. As El Topo dies of stigmata wounds (verrry symbolic), the lesbian and the other girl kiss and, I guess, ride off into the sunset.

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David Brudnoy

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Surely the most nausea-inducing flick in town is El Topo (The Mole), made by and starring the Chilean-Russian, Mexican-born Alexandro Jodorowsky. Señor Jodorowsky is brilliantly creative, a south-of-the-border Fellini. He is also, if this is conceivable, even more pretentious than the Fellini of Satyricon. Sr. Jodorowsky’s film, which the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael aptly labeled a “head film,” tells, sort of, about an avenger dressed in black cowboy drag, riding with his naked seven-year-old son into the Mexican desert for a rite de passage. After which, they happen upon a village drowning in the blood of all its people and beasts, who have been hideously slain by four comic (sic) bandits. El Topo and Son track down the villians, who’ve been annihilating another town and sodomizing the young priests, there dispatching the top-bandit by castration and leaving his lieutenants to the villagers’ ingenuity.

Abandoning the boy with the words, “Never trust anybody,” El Topo rides off with the head bandit’s woman in due course slaughtering four desert holy men in four elaborate, nearly unendurable scenes of trickery and savagery. Our Hero is then murdered by a gorgeous dyke who has joined him and his woman. As El Topo dies of stigmata wounds (verrry symbolic), the lesbian and the other girl kiss and, I guess, ride off into the sunset.