5. El Topo (1970)
El Topo is travelling on a horse in the desert with his naked son. He comes across a town where all the inhabitants have been slaughtered and he kills a Colonel responsible for it. He then leaves his son with monks and rides off with Mara - the Colonel's slave. Mara encourages El Topo to duel with four gunmen - each representing a particular belief or philosophy. He listens to what they have to say and then kills them. El Topo struggles with guilt and visits their graves which are covered in bees. A strange black clad woman with a man's voice shoots El Topo so he has stigmata type wounds. Mara runs off with the woman and a bunch of dwarves and mutants carry El Topo away. El Topo wakes up several years later to find that the dwarves and mutants have been worshipping him as a God. They have been confined to a cave network and their physical disabilities prevent them escaping. El Topo decides to help them and with the assistance of a female dwarf (who soon becomes his girlfriend) busts out of the caves and goes to get some dynamite. This involves raising money from the neighbouring depraved cultists. A monk comes into town and is disgusted by the cult. This turns out to be El Topo's son. They put aside their issues to free the captives and blow open a hole so they can get out. However, the cultists start shooting them when they emerge and El Topo himself is shot. Before he dies, he goes mad and annihilates the cultists. He dies as his girlfriend gives birth. El Topo's son dons his father's clothes and along with his father's girlfriend and baby, rides away on a horse. Definitely the best western I have ever watched, El Topo is a surreal visual masterpiece. It is weird and disturbing but achieves but achieves a certain 'look', despite a small budget, which is impressively lavish. A cult favourite Midnight Movie in the 1970s, I bet half the audiences were stoned out of their brains when they watched this. It is so surreal, you will feel like you have accidentally ingested LSD upon watching it. The movie is steeped in occult imagery and religious symbolism - you could call it a 'Spiritual Western'. The film is also filled with quite explicit sexual activity and some very nasty violence. It is hard to decode the meaning of the film due to its surrealist aspect, it is a multi-levelled film so its meaning is open to different interpretations. But if you are into wild and wonderful films, El Topo is food for the brain.