The Topo the Weird (Holy) Mountain

Apparently, this film is a cult classic, which translates to:

"You are not going to understand or like this film because you are not surrounded by passionate fans of it."

My theory is that every movie that is considered a cult classic is actually just bad. That is, until one person decides to like it ironically. That person's ironic passion spreads, and there you go.

Don't get me wrong. There are other types of great older, cheesy, cult films (Street Fighter with Sonny Chiba is one). But unlike those films, the ones I'm referring to have no redeeming qualities.

So here we have El Topo, which apparently translates to "the mole". Basically, it's a western that would result if The Last Temptation of Christ and Eyes Wide Shut had a threesome with The Wall while A Fistful of Dollars watched creepily in the corner. In the film, a gunfighter roams the desert in order to kill four master gunslingers in progressive fashion. Sounds pretty good so far, right? Kind of a little like Afro Samurai.

Well, add to that equation a naked 7 year-old boy sidekick that the gunfighter keeps as some sort of pet at the beginning of the film, lots of weird religious iconography, and an incestuous underground town of people dressed like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The questions that arise upon viewing are these: Is there any legitimacy to being weird for the sake of being weird? I mean, if one were to take a mishmash of visualized ideas and barely thread them together with the thinnest veil of a plot, what has one accomplished? If you take away the context of ideas and simply conceptualize them, are you really getting your audience to think about them, or are you just de-familiarizing these concepts under the guise of dissecting them?

But I digress into seriousness...shame on me.

I haven't even taken a moment to describe the scene where a young, athletic black man is rubbing cream on four different old white ladies who are in their underwear. He ping-pongs between them until they finally force him to the ground and lick him while growling like lions. I'm sure it's just a commentary on how changing race relations affect an aging population who were ingrained with the inaccessibility of the "other".