The man in black and the woman whom he calls "Mara," go into the desert where she convinces him that he must conquer four masters who dwell there. The masters are El Topo different types of holy men, who are subject to contests, four enigmatic mind games of a sort. The characters speak in high-flown riddles, a kind of Zen, "Confucius say" speech along the lines of "the desert is a circle." The man in black wings his contests by chicanery and realizes, too late, that he has truly lost. He cries out to ask why God has forsaken him. Meanwhile, Mara has been joined by a sadistic lesbian in butch black couture. As the stranger thrashes about in guilt for his crimes, battering himself against walls that crumble, the lesbian comes at him and pumps him full of bullets. He keeps walking, arms outstretched and with stigmata on his hands and feet, until Mara shoots him down. The women kiss with tongues lasciviously extended and leave him for dead. A group of dwarfs and cripples cart his body off.

Years have passed -- as many as two decades. He sits as a holy man in a cave in a mountain tended by a worshipful woman dwarf. Spiritually reborn, his beard and heave El Topo shaved in penitence, he pledges himself to liberate the tiny group of cripples trapped in the mountain, imprisoned there by the people of the nearby town to safeguard them from having to see the malformed results of generations of incest. The holy man begins work on a tunnel and, because of his height, he is able to scale the walls of the cave, coming and going and taking the female dwarf with him. They go into the town and we are, once more, back in a Western. The town is a synthesis of the gambling, whoring saloon towns of Western movies, with a lurid catalog of evils: blacks are sold as slaves and branded, accused of rape by lecherous women. They are lynched and so it goes. The penitent cleans toilets in the town jail and becomes a clown - God's fool - in order to buy dynamite to blast the mountains apart. Then he and the female dwarf go to the church where the parishioners pass the time playing Russian roulette, they ask to be married. The priest turns out to be his abandoned son. The three of them go back to the mountain to free the cave people. Once free, however, the crippled, helpless little monstrosities who are like deformed Munchkins rush to see the wonders of the town that is finally accessible to them. The townspeople meet them with rifles and shoot them down. By the time the holy man arrives, they have all been massacred. He yells and he, too, is shot. Again and again he is shot but he keep coming towards the townspeople like a Golem. Full of holes, he picks up a gun and, once more the avenger, retaliates by slaughtering the townspeople. Seated cross-legged, he soaks himself in kerosene for a lamp and immolates himself. A new holy family - his song, now bearded and dressed in black like his father before him and the dwarf widow, carrying their newborn baby, ride away into the fulcrum from which the movie began.

A man is riding with a naked boy on a horse, and enters a city that has been slaughtered. The man is looking for the leader of a gang. He finds the leader, who's trying to rape a lady and who's taken monks and dressed them like the Virgin Mary. The man kills the leader, kicks the boy to the ground, leaves him with the monks and takes the lady with him. The lady tells him to kill the 4 master gunmen in the desert, so he does that. Then he feels bad and gets shot by a woman in black. He's left for dead by the two women, but is still alive and gets taken to a cavern by a group of deformed people.

After that, the movie gets weird. I'm not going to go on because describing the plot would be pointless. The movie is not about what happens on screen. The movie isn't about what the characters say, either. In fact, I'm not too sure what the movie is about. I mean, this is a movie that has a naked kid burying a teddy bear while his father plays the flute, and a man in the middle of the desert eating women's shoes.

The thing about this movie is that it seems very loopy. It's like a dream. In the desert, when the man in black is with the woman, and tries to rape, her, the camera quickly cuts two or three times, then goes back to them, with the woman asking him if he loves her. You don't really get the connections between the two events.

A few things that may or may not be important in here: religion is not treated well in this movie. There are religious symbols everywhere. The bad guys dress the monks up as the Virgin Mary. The man in black says, 'I am God', then later says 'I'm not God, I'm just a human being'. Even the movie is divided up into four parts: Genesis, Prophets, Psalms and Apocalypse

Here are few more interesting things I saw that might go to explain what you're seeing. The father kicks the little away and says 'Don't depend on anyone'. A man with no legs is piggy-backing onto a man with no arms. There are these drops of modernity everywhere – women's shoes, women's make-up – making you wonder when this movie is taking place. Being delicate counts. One of the masters says 'Perfection is to lose oneself'. A bit later, the man in black says 'Too much perfection is a mistake'. The fourth master says 'Life means nothing'.

This is a movie that is quite interesting from beginning to end. One reason is that you have no idea what's going to happen. Another reason is that you want to see what happens to this guy. Why does he kick the naked kid to the ground? What happens after he's taken to the cave? Why are the bad guys in the city later in the movie treating the people that way? Some of these questions have answers, but you're always interested to know what's going on.

OVERALL : This is truly an experience that you've most likely never had before. The movie is quite interesting and has to be seen more than once to be taken all in. It's original, not fitting into the genre of western or drama or religious movie very easily. It's something you have to see at least one, and shows the creativity possible in cinema...

RATING: B