Grade:        B

Moral:        “You have completed my sanctuary of 1,000 testicles.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain doesn’t really play in the video-age: reduced to the borders of a TV and surrounded by the clutter of a living room, it comes off as a goofy relic of hippiedom. But oh boy, on the big screen it’s a freakified experience, a three-part odyssey from pure cinema to shotgun-style satire to a mystic climax in which ejaculatory tiger-nipples are the least of your worries.

Easily the most self-aware of his cinema-as-spiritualism experiments, it’s more winking than earnest, more playful than affected, and tripped-out surrealistic as only Jodorowsky can muster (he’s the clear successor to Bunuel, and we’re talking the old-school, eyeball-slicing Bunuel). If its first act hedges itself too opaquely in its own imagery and the last act inches towards Ken Russell indulgence, then accept the hilarious middle-section as amends, an out-of-nowhere swing into Dadaist sketch-comedy that begins with the line “my name is Fon; my planet is Venus” and ends with a sanctuary enshrined with testicles. Flabbergasting, acerbic, and surprisingly droll, it’s like “Saturday Night Live” written by yogis.

The Holy Mountain isn’t great cinema, but a beautifully orchestrated pipe-bomb thrown at the conventions of ‘great cinema.’ It somehow manages to give us lines like “you no longer need a master; cut my head off,” have them be amusing, intend them to be amusing, and yet never fall into the trap of intentional campiness (and then cap them with hyper-loaded religiosity, like the sudden appearance of a decapitated lamb). I’m still not sold on its self-reflexive anti-ending, which is kinda cool but kinda cod all the same, and it tends to have its cake and devour it too with its sky-high spirituality and a parodying of the same. Still, a film this funny, this serious, this artistically inclined, and so unabashed in its esotericism and its avant garde nudity (wha? A movie unafraid of wieners!?) is a success nearly by default, and that The Holy Mountain is nevertheless so much more than a mere curio is but added icing.