This is a Jodorowsky movie. That is all the warning you are going to get.
No Spoiler Warnings ahead!
- The introduction is just the Alchemist stripping two mute women naked before carefully trimming every hair from their heads before having them gently bow before each other. All set to the ominous sound of Tibetan Buddhist chanting.
- The film proper opens up on the Thief, passed out with flowers growing out of his palms, a face full of flies and pissed pants. He's then dragged off by a swarm of barely-clothed children who tie him to a cross and pelt him with rocks. After he is rudely awakened, he scares them away with a bestial roar and soon unites with his companion: a limbless dwarf who he carries on his back, Banjo-Kazooie style. And it only gets weirder from there.
- The city's despotic police force, which carries out executions in public before they are swarmed by excitable tourists that snap photos of the carnage. One even forces himself on a woman in the streets while she laughs and poses for a nearby photographer. A group of them are seen marching with rows of skinned, crucified lambs held high like something straight out of Silent Hill.
- The brief yet agonizingly long scene of an old man offering his glass eye to what is heavily implied to be an underage prostitute.
- The scene of the conquest of Mexico being reenacted as a public show, with lizards as the Aztecs and bullfrogs as the Spaniards is mostly comical, but has a rather horrifying finale. Blood sprays out of the temples in massive quantities before explosives beneath the table are set off beneath LIVE FROGS. The only redeeming factor of this scene is that this film was made in a time before the animal rights movement became mainstream.
- It's also hosted by a man wearing an eyepatch and a Nazi tophat that speaks in gibberish. Because why not?
- A group of obese men dressed as Romans notice that the Thief looks exactly like Christ (one of whom is eating chicken inside of a hollowed-out, taxidermied cow) and decide to get him blackout drunk. When the thief wakes up in a pile of potatoes and finds out that he was used to make the plaster mold for hundreds of Jesus sculptures, he screams his lungs out before violently destroying all but one of them - which he carries with him from that point on.
- The Alchemist ritual cleans the Thief after deciding to take him in as his apprentice. And he cleans every single part of him.
- Isla runs a weapons factory that sells everything from handguns to atom bombs. One of her weapons is a gas that turns people into violent killers, demonstrated by showing an armless little person in an army helmet screaming his lungs out while stomping and spitting on a mannequin.
- She also sells psychedelic rock-and-roll themed weapons to hippies and protesters. Alongside religious-themed weapons for Jews, Christians and Buddhists. If there's an audience, she will reach out to it.
- Sel first appears as a clown, entertaining children and throwing candy out to hordes of children. When she gets to her factory, a group of men in business suits surround her with a curtain of fur coats and assist her with changing out of her costume. When they disperse, her true colors are shown as a cold, calculating aristocrat.
- Sel runs a toy factory that builds toys intended to indoctrinate children as soldiers for future conflicts. When her supercomputer predicts a war with Peru, she orders the creation of a massive line of toys, comics and games intended to demonize their residents so that the kids will have no qualms against ethnic cleansing. Even a violent laxative dyed to match the skin color of the locals. One old man operating a machine is disgusted by a child's refusal to shoot a target. He throws a switch and the kid's headset makes him writhe in agony.
Sel: In fifteen years, they will be ready to fight. To kill Peruvians with pleasure. - Berg has an...unusual apartment, filled with severed taxidermy heads, a crib that holds their pet python and a very, very tall toilet. His wife also sings while she's on the can.
- Berg serves the president of an unnamed country as a financial advisor, informing him that the nation's current population risks financial ruin. The president calmly picks up the phone and informs whoever is on the line to enact genocide against his own people.President: Begin the operation of the gas houses, gas schools, gas universities, gas dance halls and gas whorehouses, et cetera.
- Berg seemingly enjoys a nice afternoon out with his wife in the park. As the two enjoy cake and tea, he reaches out to the cake with a delicate hand...before thrashing it apart.
- Berg: I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!!!
- Axon. An Axe-Crazy police chief with his own cult that ritually castrates his own disciples and brutally massacres protesters on sight. The violence against the protesters is all creatively simulated (a man has sausages pulled from his stomach and a woman bleeds sand), yet it somehow makes it more disturbing.
- All of the hallucinations that the main characters suffer on the Holy Mountain. All of them.
