The Holy Mountain

(This review initially ran in the Purchase College Independent on September 13th, 2007, in a slightly different form.)

If you’re looking for reviews of solely new releases, you’ve come to the wrong place. I love movies, but not the ones generally playing at the local multiplex; besides, if you’re dead set on seeing, say, Good Luck Chuck, my opinion of Dane Cook’s smarmy dudebro routine is hardly going to dissuade you. In what I hope to make a regular feature, I’ll be reviewing various movies I’ve seen on my own time, including some that you’ve never heard of, some that you may be vaguely aware of but have never actually seen, and some that are fairly infamous but rarely viewed in all their uncut glory. These will range from high-concept art movies to low-budget b-horror, essentially Whatever I Feel Like.

I’ll start with The Holy Mountain (1973), one of my all-time favorites and one of those archetypal cult films that developed a following through word-of-mouth. I personally had never heard of it until junior year, when a friend urged me to watch a movie in which birds fly out of dying martyrs’ bullet wounds and a man turns his own shit into gold. Due to legal issues, Holy Mountain, as well as director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s most famous film, the spiritual western El Topo, were kept out of distribution for decades, though both were finally released on remastered DVD last May.

The plot basically centers around a Christlike thief whose desire for wealth leads him to the “Alchemist,” played by Jodorowsky himself. He later accompanies the Alchemist and assorted corrupt heads of industry and government on a spiritual quest for the titular Holy Mountain. Sounds fairly simple, doesn’t it?

Well, to put it bluntly, this film is weird as all hell.

Some people have called Jodorowsky “pretentious” in his use of surrealist symbolism, but such an argument ignores all the absurd humor and flat-out glorious madness in Holy Mountain. The thief wanders through a satirical Mexico in which tourists with whiny American accents gleefully snap photos of bloody executions from beneath their tacky souvenir sombreros; at one point, the thief stops to watch a historical re-creation of the conquering of Mexico using toads and lizards that hop around to a faux-Nazi march. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, appropriated in Marilyn Manson’s “Dope Show” video, a crucifix mold is made of the thief’s body while he’s passed-out drunk; awakening in a roomful of life-size plaster Christs, he screams with rage and goes postal on his duplicates. His companions on the quest for enlightenment include a designer of psychedelic weapons meant to appeal to hippies, a manufacturer of mechanisms planted inside corpses so they can kiss their loved ones goodbye at the funeral, and a police chief with a roomful of his followers’ severed testicles. Lest you think this movie is only for stoners, a detour on the journey to the Holy Mountain leads to a hedonistic resort, in which a guy who pompously claims all religion to be an acid trip is portrayed as a giant douchebag.

Believe me, folks, I’ve barely touched on all the bizarrity of this movie. Unlike other feature-length films with surreal elements, Holy Mountain includes no character to serve as an anchor of normalcy, like Blue Velvet’s Jeffrey Beaumont. You’re tossed into Jodorowsky’s world and left to make of it what you will.