The gunfighter El Topo ("The Mole") and his young son ride through a desert to a village, whose inhabitants have been massacred. Bandits are nearby, torturing and killing the survivors. El Topo rescues a woman (Mara), who leads him on a mission to find and defeat the four master gunmen of the desert. Leaving his son with a group of monks, El Topo and Mara complete the mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black. The women leave El Topo wounded in the desert, where he is found by a clan of deformed people who take him to the remote cavern where they live. Awakening years later, he goes with a dwarf woman to a nearby town, promising to dig a tunnel through which the cave-dwellers can escape. They find the town run by a vicious sheriff and home to a bizarre religious cult. El Topo's son, now a man, is a monk in the town. The completion of the tunnel leads El Topo, the townspeople, and the cave-dwellers to a bloody and tragic end. Source

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo is simply amazing. It packs so much symbolism and metaphor into one film that you simply can't cover it all in one review. It's his masterpiece and a favorite of John Lennon - that's why I've included a lot more screens that usual. You ache as the characters seek to free themselves from their internal pain. They writhe in agony and go on spiritual quests and miraculously tragic adventures. Jodorowsky put Clint Eastwood to shame (with his watered down spaghetti westerns). Find a copy or buy something from my amazon wish list and I'll send it to you.

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Two men and a woman happen to meet in a bar. We learn from their conversations both the intriguing and banal details of their lives. But is anyone really telling the truth? From the meat market, to the president's drinking habit or the soviet cloning project, this allegory opposes different aspects of contemporary Russian society. Source

This film is bleak. It's a metaphorical study of Russian society by director Ilya Khrzhanovsky. Dogs, meat, absurd false conversations, weary faces. It's a world devoid of much humanity and full of existential angst and misery. That's not so say the film is poor - it's more rich in misery. I can't describe the feeling is the pit of my stomach after viewing the female protagonist's experience of the funeral of her sister. She travels back to her peasant town and her peasant relatives are so lost in their own world - trapped in their upbringing and environment, that it's indescribably weird and disturbing. You have to see it to believe it. You feel some sorrow for their plight and situation but you're repulsed just as much and you're happy for her - that she escaped even if the world of the city is debauched and cold. Better to live soullessly than live diseased. Not an easy watch but interesting and compelling.

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