LA Weekly

Writer-director-seer Alejandro Jodorowsky unveils restored, uncut 35 mm prints of films largely unseen in three decades, freed after the end of Jodorowsky’s protractedly bitter rights battle with former Rolling Stones business manager and attorney Allen Klein. The colorfully absurd El Topo (1971) is an aggressively transcendent Western peppered with stunning natural scenery and instantly interesting characters. “I am God,” proclaims the wily, pipa-playing El Topo, as he travels desert wastes with a woman who persuades him to kill four master gunfighters so that she’ll love him more. El Topo encounters an armless man carrying a legless man, and has a duel in a vale of dying rabbits. An untouchable old man deflects El Topo’s bullets with a butterfly net. It’s a condemnation of the carnal in the face of the deific, steeped in biblical and Zen themes with mystical symbology — and, to this end, the camera is used to reveal, not just to show. The John Lennon–funded The Holy Mountain (1973) begins with a Christ figure followed by an adoring whore and her chimpanzee. He climbs the tower of a master alchemist (Jodorowsky himself), who turns shit into gold and reads the tarot. Gathering nine soul-corroded, ultrascummy capitalists representing the planets, the Christ figure plans an assault on the Holy Mountain of Lotus Island, the summit of which shelters immortals controlling the fate of the cosmos. This utterly gorgeous film radiates enlightenment and imagination — if it fails at all, it fails bigger, more beautifully and more ambitiously than any movie you may ever see. In April, ABKCO Films plans a DVD box set including the remastered versions of El Topo, Fando y Lis and The Holy Mountain, along with the usual exhaustive retinue of extras, director’s commentary, and soundtracks composed by Jodorowsky, Martín Fierro and Don Cherry. (Nuart)