The Holy Mountain

Not even Buñuel with a brainful of Woodstock's bad brown acid could have made something this gloriously screwy.

Alejandro Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain is a dazzling, rambling, often incoherent satire on consumerism, militarism and exploitation.

This is an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.

Jodorowsky loves to confront the viewer with endless brutality and grotesque decadence and degradation, but here he expresses it with a rich, densely visual imagination.

Neither for the faint of heart or the linear of thinker, The Holy Mountain qualifies both as a fascinating period relic and an enduringly transfixing jaw-dropper.

Halfway through we're introduced to nine industrialists and politicians -- they narrate their heinous biographies in Godardian voiceover -- who embark up the title mountain to become immortal. Dude.

A rambling stream-of-consciousness quest that - in its final, self-conscious act - celebrates the primacy of the filmed image.

starts off with great promise but quickly descends into a kind of monotonous spiral of escalating pretension and wearisome shock tactics

So loaded with symbols and religious references that the frames of the films flash by as if Jodorowsky were shuffling a deck of his beloved tarot cards...

The Old and New Testament scrambled as a most sustained 'shroom hallucination, one sight at a time out of Alejandro Jodorowsky's bottomless tank

Jodorowsky's 1973 surreal fantasy is just too much to dig through.

a kaleidoscope of vibrant colours, free-floating archetypes and picaresque episodes, all packaged to disorient and confound us with its sheer exuberance, before finally bringing us right back to exactly who we are and what it is that we are seeing.