Sceptical audieneces may feel there is not much to Jodorowsky's daring juxtapostions, and watching El Topo one often has the feeling of intruding on someone's bad and highly personal dream.
Comment
05/24/03
El Topo (1970)
74
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:31
Fresh:23
Rotten:8
Average Rating:6.7/10
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Reviews for El Topo
A mass of indecipherable symbols combined with obvious self-indulgence on the part of a writer-director-star Alexandro Jodorowsky make what could have been an entertaining western into one of the more pretentious films ever made.
08/29/06
Everything about this mystical trip smacks of narcissism, even the scenes where the filmmaker is lowering himself in acts of self-deprecation.
04/05/05
With style constantly contradicting content, and the prevailing mood redolent of egotism and misogyny, it leaves one the feeling of having waded through a full-blown fantasy where even the self-degradation emerges as just another form of narcissism.
01/26/06
A dated counterculture goulash long hyped as art by a blank generation desperate for something different.
07/14/07
A dreary, protracted exercise in sadomasochism.
03/16/07
Top CriticWithout the aid of mind-expanding narcotics though, El Topo can't help looking laughably ramshackle, the combination of bad dubbing, shoddy camerawork and over-the-top performances making it pretty much unwatchable by modern standards.
04/10/07
This is gutbucket Luis Buñuel , surrealism on the cheap, and it hasn't dated well -- the blood is patently fake and the gunshots are dubbed.
01/26/07
One things for sure, they certainly don't make 'em like this any more. Nor, I suspect, would anyone want them to.
04/07/07
a mystic trip through political, religious and philosophical terrains, gunning down all normative notions of what the western - or indeed Western civilisation - is supposed to be.
07/04/07
haunting and haunted, flitting at the edges of Jodorowsky's masculine fantasy
05/01/07
No review available.
04/28/04
Violent, visionary, vital.
05/02/07
No review available.
06/17/05
El Topo would be part of the revolutionary, post-'60s movement of Antonio das Mortes and The Last Movie if its private mythology didn't belong so obviously to its maker's acid subconscious.
12/11/06
You may find it a tiresome, macho relic -- or a ragtag circus wandering through a fantasy realm part Treasure of the Sierra Madre, part Tolkien's Middle-earth.
12/12/06
Top CriticAs perplexing as large parts of it are, the film certainly isn't boring. And it's kind of fun trying to figure out what it's all supposed to mean.
07/13/07
For the adventurous viewer, El Topo is a bizarre, colorful, unforgettable experience.
06/14/07
The surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky created his own midnight cult version of the Spaghetti Western which, once seen, is not easily forgotten. Some of his macabre and mystical images linger, both fascinating and strange.
07/11/02
An extravagant hodgepodge of hand-me-down surrealism, mysticism, Italian westerns, theater of cruelty, and Buñuel -- more enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.
07/11/02
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