Jodorowsky's 1973 surreal fantasy is just too much to dig through.
The Holy Mountain (1973)
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Reviews Counted:17
Fresh:14
Rotten:3
Average Rating:6.9/10
Synopsis: This 1973 film continues the strange and surreal tradition that cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky began in his FANDO Y LIS and EL TOPO. Marrying mysticism with religious imagery, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN... This 1973 film continues the strange and surreal tradition that cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky began in his FANDO Y LIS and EL TOPO. Marrying mysticism with religious imagery, THE HOLY MOUNTAIN centers on the Thief, a man who is messianic in both appearance and ideals. He meets the Alchemist (Jodorowsky), a man who wishes to rid people of all the trappings of modern living and take them on a spiritual quest. Like Jodorowsky's other work, the plot is secondary to the visuals, which are at once bizarre and beautiful. [More]
Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Starring: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
Director: Alejandro Jodorowsky
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Reviews for The Holy Mountain
a kaleidoscope of vibrant colours, free-floating archetypes and picaresque episodes, all packaged to disorient and confound us with its sheer exuberance, before finally bringing us right back to exactly who we are and what it is that we are seeing.
Not even Buñuel with a brainful of Woodstock’s bad brown acid could have made something this gloriously screwy.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain is a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and exploitation.
Not the unsubtle 'what' he is saying in 'The Holy Mountain,' but the individualized 'how,' is filmmaker Jodorowsky's strength.
This is an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.
Jodorowsky loves to confront the viewer with endless brutality and grotesque decadence and degradation, but here he expresses it with a rich, densely visual imagination.
Despite all its fanciful Buñuelesque surrealism and echoes of Tod Browning's Freaks, it's not that far removed from the pop-culture movies that surround it.
So extreme in its sacrilege that it achieves a kind of sacredness, The Holy Mountain is a transcendental feast of the grotesque and the sublime.
Neither for the faint of heart or the linear of thinker, The Holy Mountain qualifies both as a fascinating period relic and an enduringly transfixing jaw-dropper.
Halfway through we're introduced to nine industrialists and politicians -- they narrate their heinous biographies in Godardian voiceover -- who embark up the title mountain to become immortal. Dude.
Jodorowsky's greatest and most ambitious midnight movie, a wickedly outrageous masterpiece that towers over its better-known precursor El Topo... an ingeniously overstimulated film that could never be replicated today.
The mise-en-scene is packed with colorful, often shocking images (blood and body wastes are recurring motifs) but orchestrated in a creative delirium.
It's slightly tedious going, but you certainly get plenty to look at, what with costumed frogs and lizards re-enacting the conquest of Mexico.
Jodorowsky appears to have satirical targets in his sights, but when the viewer is caught up in this barrage of images often playful, occasionally horrible, frequently beautiful, but always fascinating, it's hard to discern a coherent point.
More overtly religious and New Agey than Jodorowsky's other pictures, it describes a spiritual quest and slings in outrageous shocks at every opportunity, yielding many eyefuls and some occasional food for thought.
The icons, indirect references, and allusions – some obvious, most are ambiguous – occur with meticulous frequency. For the matter, even the most incidental detail or prop relays a history of meaning.
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