El Topo (1970)

"Who are you to judge me?"

"I am God."

I don't usually recite the plots of films for this blog- it's a pretty redundant thing to do- but I'll briefly do so for El Topo so as to underline the surreality: a mysterious gunfighter in black is riding around aimlessly with his mostly naked seven year old son for some reason, when he comes across a village which has been violently massacred with blood everywhere, and discovers that this is the work of the bizarre Colonel, whose reign of debauchery over a nearby monastery is both incredibly surreal and full of Catholic symbolism; this is the most Bunuelesque bit, I suppose, but there's an awful lot of vague counterculture Eastern philosophical symbolism too.

So suddenly there's a girl, and a kind of fairytale martial arts vibe as she pledges to love him only if he fights and bests four eccentric gunfighting masters. Then the two girls with whom he's having a relationship turn on him and shoot him. Then suddenly he's finding a way to release a large group of incestuous underground prisoners, only for them to be massacred in turn by the denizens of the not-very-nice local town. But long before the end even of the first act we reach a point where the very concept of narrative plot is very, very tenuous. There's lots of sex, violence and blood though.

What does all this mean? Buggered if I know. There's loads of symbolism, both Catholic and Eastern but, the 20th century having begotten Dada, surrealism, modernism, postmodernism and, indeed, the Sixties, I have no idea. But this is without a doubt the weirdest of the 455 films I've blogged.