The Alchemist (Alejandro Jodorowsky) sits in his high tower, inducting two women into the art of his arcane beliefs, but it is not they who he will concentrate his efforts towards enlightenment on. For outside, lying dazed in the dirt of the village road, is the Thief (Horácio Salinas), his face covered in flies. He is taken by a man with stumps for limbs and some laughing children to a cross where they proceed to crucify him, but somehow this snaps him out of his stupor; he unties himself and climbs down. Now ambition begins to take hold, ambition which will bring him on a strange journey...
After the midnight movie success of writer and director Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, the promoter who had made a small fortune with that effort, Beatles money man Allen Klein, put up another small fortune to pay for a follow up. Jodorowsky put this increased allowance to good use, with every scene throwing up a suitably wild image or two. Surely it couldn't lose, but that's precisely what happened, perhaps due to Klein's eccentric, cheeseparing release of The Holy Mountain, as the new work came to be called. Often viewed as essentially El Topo on a far bigger budget, spiritually it may have been a far more ambitious, even aspiring production than its predecessor.
Unfortunately, that did not mean it was in any way, shape or form more coherent and Jodorowsky appeared intent on creating a story that would only make sense if the audience were out of their minds on hallucinogenic drugs. For the other, more sober observers, the film is a mixture of supposed religious revelation and spiritual enlightenment with pretentious, fable-like narratives, but no less impressive on a visual level as truly there was nobody before or since prepared to go that extra mile to put the crazed imagery in his head onto the screen than Jodorowsky. As a result, the film carries you along through sheer curiosity as to what bizarre visuals will arrest you next.
The Thief does eventually make it to the Alchemist's tower, although not before he stages the Conquistadors' conquering of Mexico with lizards and toads, like you do, and once inside he confronts the mystic with one of the worst-choreographed combat sequences you're likely to witness. The Thief is easily overpowered and adopted as a disciple by his new mentor, which means literally turning his shit into gold and getting high on the resulting fumes. Presumably this is something to do with advancing higher on the ladder to enlightenment, but it looks to be asking too much of most of the audience to have to take this seriously, or even as the film asks by the end, implement this iconoclastic doctrine into your everyday life, since it is so far removed from reality as most recognise it.
Regardless, the film carries on to introduce us, and the Thief, to the people who will be accompanying him on his journey, a bunch of tyrannical industrialists and politicians who commit outlandish acts such as collecting testicles or creating a robot vagina, which in one stand out sequence is given an orgasm by a naked woman wielding a huge phallus, which results in the birth of another identical but much smaller robot whose mother cradles it in its robot-y arms. Take that, The Lion King, there's your circle of life right there. As incredibly inventive as all this is, The Holy Mountain does wear you down and by the end it's a stout constitution that has not had more than enough of the cosmic yet barely explained philosophy, a flaw that renders it superficially amusing but redundantly outrageous. And we never find out why, if Jodorowsky is so preoccupied with the opening of minds, he has such a fascination with the human body. It's a paradox. Music by the director, Ronald Frangipane and Don Cherry.
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