A film that screams "product of its time," The Holy Mountain was Alejandro Jodorowsky's dizzying elegy to the sex, drugs and spiritual awakening of the late 1960s and early 1970s -- a suitably bizarre follow-up to his El Topo (1971). Fascinating although it only fitfully makes sense, The Holy Mountain is beautifully shot and designed, and it suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together. A Christ-like
vagrant and thief wanders through a perverse and unfriendly land until he encounters an enlightened one, who gathers the thief and six of the world's most powerful individuals for a spiritual pilgrimage. If that description sounds a bit sketchy, well, narrative isn't this film's strongest suit. But if you want to see the conquest of Mexico re-enacted by reptiles, soldiers shoot innocent people as birds fly from their wounds, and a wizard turn feces into gold, this is the movie for you. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi
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.
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.
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.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's batshit paean to spiritual liberation gets a nice cleanup and an invaluable commentary track from the writer-director on Blu-ray.
So loaded with symbols and religious references that the frames of the films flash by as if Jodorowsky were shuffling a deck of his beloved tarot cards...
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.
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.
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.
"Your sacrifice completes my Sanctuary of a Thousand Testicles." lol!
The only thing further out is a cartoon by A.A.P. Like a cinematic equivalent to the Beatles' Tommorow Never Knows - takes a few holy texts and rocks them out, hard.
"Zoom back, camera!"
This psychedelic, LSD-induced masterpiece is not only visually ambitious, with impeccable editing and cinematography, but is also absolutely imaginative, making brilliant use of archetypes and symbolism in a smart social commentary. Also, it is impressive how the fantastic score helps create the perfect atmosphere in
every scene.
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