YMMV / El Topo

• Awesome Music: The theme song, "The Desert Is A Circle," especially the version used in the trailers.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: Actually, maybe El Topo is Jesus. Or perhaps Siddhartha?
• Complete Monster: In this surreal allegory of religion and philosophy, it is The Colonel who proves himself to be purely evil for his own entertainment, despite only being El Topo's first prominent opponent. The leader of a band of eccentric and cruel bandits whom he considers to be his "dogs", the Colonel keeps a woman as his personal slave—with heavy implications of rape—and has all the inhabitants of a village massacred, including the children, impaling a woman and hanging men from the ceiling of a church. Arriving at a Franciscan mission, the Colonel turns the town into a graveyard littered with dozens of corpses by allowing his men to use the civilians as targets for shooting practice or simply randomly murder whoever they want.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Because of Hollywood's total indifference to the Mexican film industry at the time, Jodorowsky did what he was best at to get their attention: scaring the crap out of people. To drum up hype, he bragged about killing all the dead animals on set himself (they were bought frozen), eating human meat tacos (he did not) and actually sexually assaulting the woman who played Mara during the sex scene (he did not, but this particular stunt got him in deep shit decades later.)
• This Is Your Premise on Drugs: Spaghetti Western on acid. Can also be considered a Buddhist Western. El Topo's quest to be the best gunslinger has many parallels to the quest for personal enlightenment, and each one of the Masters has a philosophy that, while ultimately getting them killed at El Topo's hands, nevertheless causes him a Heroic BSoD after defeating them. He even kills himself by setting himself on fire while sitting in lotus position, an obvious parallel to Buddhist monks who have done the same.

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