A double bill that's trippy, deranged, and classic '70s underground
Maybe there are certain illegal substances you ingested back in the hippie days that you haven't gotten around to telling the children about. The double bill of restored Alejandro Jodorowsky freak-outs starting today at the Brattle is their cinematic equivalent. Let your kids know you once grokked "El Topo" (1970) and "The Holy Mountain" (1973) and they'll be asking to look at your pupils.
Relics of the early midnight-movie days, the films are completely, wonderfully deranged: extreme fusions of spaghetti westerns, Carlos Castaneda pan-spiritual jive, soft - core art-porn, and undergraduate religious symbolism. Jodorowsky was born in Chile and worked from France (he studied mime with Marcel Marceau , go figure), but his movies are set amid the desert wastes and folkloric iconography of Mexico. In anything-goes imagery and energy, they prefigure both David Lynch and the new Mexican school of Cuarón , Iñárritu , and del Toro . (Not coincidentally, Jodorowsky spent the mid-'70s laboring on a mammoth adaptation of "Dune" that was eventually, and catastrophically, taken over by Lynch.)
"El Topo" ("The Mole") came out of nowhere in 1970 to become a mainstay of the alterna-theater programming that would flower with "Harold and Maude" and "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Actually, you can thank John Lennon, who was so blown away by a screening of the film that he urged Beatle s manager Allen Klein to buy worldwide distribution rights.
Audiences showed up expecting a happening and got an absurdly violent, lysergically visionary head-trip about an avenging Man in Black (Jodorowsky himself) who takes on four master gunslingers while riding around on horseback with his naked son (played by the director's own child). Halfway through, "El Topo" switches course, "Mulholland Drive"-style, and becomes a parable about a race of deformed cave dwellers seeking acceptance from a nearby town.
This is gutbucket Luis Buñ uel , surrealism on the cheap, and it hasn't dated well -- the blood is patently fake and the gunshots are dubbed. "El Topo" doesn't hold up as a document of feminism either (the women are unclad symbolic objects of lust and fear), and the treatment of animals would put the PETA board into a collective coma. Jodorowsky's conceptual arrogance is hard to swallow -- he reportedly modeled the ice phallus on his own equipment -- but his lack of restraint and eye for a bonkers visual almost saves the film.
"The Holy Mountain" is even more unhinged, but it's the better movie. Because John and Yoko were financing , Jodorowsky was allowed to indulge himself: The images have a painterly calm at times, but mostly you could use individual frames as posters for peyote parties. (Both films are showing in restored prints, but this one is especially breathtaking.)
"Mountain" is more overtly political as well. It's ostensibly the tale of a Christ-like Thief (Hor ácio Salinas ) who is guided by an Alchemist (Jodorowsky again , looking like Captain Beefheart in vestments), but halfway through we're introduced to nine industrialists and politicians -- they narrate their heinous biographies in Godardian voice - over -- who embark up the title mountain to become immortal. Dude.
The film is nothing if not serious, which is why it's often hilarious; for all the avant-garde envelope pushing here, "Mountain" is finally disappointingly sane. The director doesn't throw away a single idea, though. Yes, there's a scene in which the Alchemist transmutes the Thief's excreta into gold while a nude, tattooed woman plays cello and a pelican wanders through the foreground -- it's the stuff of future downtown performance art.
But Jodorowsky also gives us a miniature recapitulation of the Conquest of Mexico -- using live horned toads and frogs in eensy-weensy period costumes -- that works as outrage, brilliant political comedy, and art. Rarely has a creative mind cried out for an editor more; rarely have the benefits of not having that editor been so apparent. "El Topo" and "The Holy Mountain" are keepsakes of an era that believed nothing exceeds like excess. You can get a contact high just watching them.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 
