El Topo
El Topo is a 1970 film from Mexico, directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, running 125 minutes. reelscum files it under spaghetti western and acid & psychedelic.
- Year
- 1970 · 1970s films
- Country
- Mexico
- Runtime
- 125 min
- Director
- Alejandro Jodorowsky
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (18/100)
- Also known as
- El Topo · The Mole
Defined in the glossary: Spaghetti western, Acid & psychedelic
Jodorowsky's mystical, violent acid western. It essentially invented the midnight movie.
Alejandro Jodorowsky's symbol-drenched acid western, in which a black-clad gunslinger crosses a surreal desert on a violent spiritual quest, is the film that created the midnight-movie circuit in New York. It is grotesque, beautiful, blasphemous and completely uninterpretable, and audiences returned to it again and again to decode it.
Jodorowsky stars, directs and provides his own dense mythology. It launched the whole cult-repertory phenomenon and remains one of the strangest films ever to find an audience. Approach it as a ritual rather than a narrative.
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Written about
- Exploitation films of the 1970s, the boom and the bust
Exploitation films of the 1970s explained through the ratings gap, the drive-in double bill, the cycles that ran fast, and the censors who cut them.
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Psych-Out
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