The proper way to review this legendary Mexican art piece would be to have a Bible on hand with dozens of pages marked by Post-It notes to help interpret the film’s constant Christ allusions. An uber-art film, a surrealist’s baffling tour de force, a dense thicket of Biblical references, one of the ultimate hallucinogenic trip-outs of the cinema, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo makes most of Ingmar Bergman’s work look like that movie about the rapping kangaroo in terms of complexity. 
On the surface though, it’s that old story that we’ve all seen a million times about the Old West gunfighter/Christ figure who becomes top dog in the land after he kills all of the acknowledged master gunfighters around in quick succession, only to get shot down by a lesbian who wants his ladyfriend and so he ends up in a coma for twenty years, eventually waking up to find himself having been cared for all of that time by a bunch of dwarves who need his help in liberating them from oppression so he shaves his head and becomes a mime. I think there’s an old Roy Rogers movie with almost the exact same plot. 
Whether you follow what’s happening or not, the film IS, at the least, a stunning series of images executed with a painter’s eye. Two shots don’t seem to go by without one of them having some mindbendingly surreal moment. There’s also a lot of humor here. My favorite image is the ramshackle, pathetic house band of a clandestine orgy party in a basement. The scene is scored with jaunty, bouncy, almost-Dixieland music that the band on screen couldn’t possibly be playing. It’s funny.
El Topo was the first film to become a big hit strictly on the midnight movie circuit, paving the way for the late night screening success stories of films like Pink Flamingos and Eraserhead. It built a following at the Elgin Theater in New York City, where it was barely publicized, but word-of-mouth and reviews in the underground press brought in the freaky acid crowd and the art weirdos who gave it a long life there. At John Lennon’s urging, so the story goes, Allen Klein’s ABKCO company purchased the film and then spread it far and wide. Like most things controlled by that old creep Klein (such as the records on the ABCKO-owned Cameo-Parkway label) the picture eventually fell out of circulation and remained legally unavailable for decades. It saw its first official home video release in 2007, on a brilliantly restored DVD.