Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I haven’t watched my Jodrowsky box yet. Part of it is just time. I haven’t had a chance. But part of it is also because I almost don’t want to watch them. I’ve waited so long for these to be on DVD that now that I have them, I almost don’t want to ruin it by watching them and finally having an opinion about these films, so often discussed, so rarely seen. Leave it to Vern to more than man up for the task. This is a fantastic Vern piece, and a reminder of why he’s one of my favorite writers about film anywhere:
‘If all mankind shitted from a two-meter high toilet, we could have all the electricity we wanted.’
–Alejandro Jodorowsky, HOLY MOUNTAIN commentary
My friends, we will have peace in the Middle East. We will find cures for cancer and AIDS. The honey bees will return to their hives. Michael Bay will apologize and surrender himself to movie jail without incident. I know these things are possible because the impossible has happened: director Alejandro Jodorowsky and producer/Beatles manager Alan Klein have ended their 30 year feud. Everybody’s friends again, so Anchor Bay releases their THE FILMS OF ALEJANDRO JODOROWSKY box set Tuesday.
This is literally the Holy Grail of DVDs. When Jodorowsky ditched plans to direct THE STORY OF O thirty years ago, Klein paid him back by shelving his other movies. So EL TOPO and HOLY MOUNTAIN have been legendary cult movies, but have not received the wide home viewing they deserve. You could never get these from corporate sources like Blockbuster or Netflix, because the copies in circulation were bootlegs. Jodorowsky supplied the materials to the pirates himself just to get the movies seen. (I wonder what section Blockbuster will put EL TOPO in?) (read the rest of this shit…)
PLOT SUMMARY: When a dwarf with no hands or feet and some little kids try to stone a naked dude they found passed out, pissing himself with his face covered in flies, the naked dude and the little guy smoke a joint, hug and become fast friends. So they go into town, where tourists laugh and take pictures of the troops executing school children, and they watch the frogs and chameleons re-enact the conquest of Mexico in a model city. Also the naked dude looks like Jesus and these guys drug him and make a cast of him and he wakes up surrounded by hundreds of duplicates of himself so he screams and smashes them but takes one and carries it around for a while and later he eats its face off and ties it to a bunch of helium balloons and sets it free. He hangs out with 12 hookers in matching see-through black outfits. One of them is an old lady, one is a little girl and they also have a chimpanzee. Some people might call it 13 hookers I guess, but I’m old fashioned so I’m gonna assume the chimpanzee is just an associate and not a professional. 
The wind whistles in the distance as a scary cowboy in black rides through the desert. And for some reason he’s holding an umbrella. As he gets closer and steps off the horse we see he has a little boy with him too, naked except for a hat and a pair of mocassins. He hands the boy a teddy bear.
