A bloody spaghetti western, heavily infused with Eastern spiritualism, it centres on a hero (played by Jodorowsky himself), who is the western genres archetypal man in black. Known only as El Topo (the mole), he is an enigmatic, leather-clad gunslinger who travels the plains with his naked seven-year-old-son (Jodorowskys own son, Brontis). In the opening section, father and son encounter a grisly massacre. They track down the evil Colonel behind it and castrate him, rescuing Mara, a beautiful young woman (Mara Lorenzio) who is being threatened by the Colonels henchmen. El Topo then abruptly abandons his son to fulfill a mission set by Mara. He defeats a series of gun masters, only to be shot, seemingly dead, by another incredibly beautiful woman. The films second half sees him wake up, pale with a ginger shock-haired wig, looking rather like a Fraggle in a nappy. He is in a cave inhabited by a community of disabled people, who venerate him as a saviour before he sets himself alight and undergoes transmogrification by bees.

Creating a whole new sub-genre, the so-called acid western, El Topo is a heady, arguably at times unwatchable, brew of Chinese philosophy, Zen Buddhism, astrology, Sufism, European surrealism, the Kabbalah and, above all, the tarot, a life-long passion for Jodorowsky, who has written many a treatise on the subject and created his own deck. In this overwhelming mlange of baffling allegory, its fair to say that story or plot is not a priority, and, as with the intuitive meanings of tarot, you have to tune in or drop out.

That it became a cult hit in 1971 New York was a question of right time, right place. Its not hard to see its appeal to Lennon and other leading lights of the contemporary counter-culture, who were looking to the East for new mind-expanding philosophies. Though even the most esoteric head freaks at the time struggled to keep pace with Jodorowsky, who concluded one hilarious 1971 interview by insisting that a piece of cheese can be Christ to a bewildered uh huh by the journalist.

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El Topo: The weirdest western ever made - BBC News