The Holy Mountain (1973)
Rated R
The Holy Mountain is not a movie you just watch, or a movie you go into expecting it to make sense, even if I think I was able to make sense of it. (I think.) When Popcorn Frights screened it on Friday night, they outright told us in the audience to not even bother trying to figure it out, and to just let it wash over us. It's Alejandro Jodorowsky making a surreal acid trip of a movie, ironically a better "stoner flick" than the previous night's Half Baked, a film with little dialogue but tons of mystical and occult imagery and broader themes about finding one's place in an increasingly decadent, materialistic world, climaxing in an ending that takes a bulldozer straight to the fourth wall. Ironically, the one character in the film who uses drugs is portrayed as spiritually lost despite Jodorowsky himself having used LSD in the process of making it, and the ending is Jodorowsky's way of telling the audience that it's all just a movie and that they shouldn't overthink it. It's the definition of a "midnight movie" that isn't a camp classic like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, but rather, the kind of film you experience with a big crowd to have your mind blown.
The imagery grabbed my attention right off the bat when it showed police murdering a crowd of people, only for everybody to start filming it on their own personal video cameras and seemingly having a party, complete with two people having sex in the middle of the street. It's a scene that must have felt fifty years ago to be a grotesque parody of modern society, but nowadays feels like a scene that you'd throw into an attempted satire of the "social media generation" if you wanted to be really heavy-handed and on-the-nose, only with a retro '70s aesthetic instead of smartphones. We witness traditional Christian religion being hollowed out by way of giant mass-marketed crucifixes and a church being a gathering spot for prostitutes, one of whom becomes an important supporting character as she falls in love with the closest thing we have to a protagonist, an impoverished man credited only as "the Thief" who looks uncannily like Jesus. The various people pursuing enlightenment all had day jobs centered on running the corrupt systems turning this world into such a hellhole, from a police chief who's built a cult of personality around himself in the police force to an arms manufacturer who sells specially-designed guns to religious fanatics and countercultural protesters alike. Say what you will about this movie's aesthetics, but while it may very much look like a product of its time, it sure as hell didn't feel like it. This movie's metaphorical depiction of a soulless world tearing itself apart could've been made today, with only minimal changes that mostly come down to recognizing the existence of the internet.
The Bottom Line
Words can't do this movie justice, and I don't think I can either without going into a 10,000-word wall of text that I'm pretty sure people who are paid to write about movies for a living have already done better. If you couldn't tell from my brief description, this movie isn't for everyone, but it's not an experience you're likely to forget.
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