El Topo (1970)

Director:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

Writer:
Alejandro Jodorowsky

The movie takes place in two parts. The first half resembles a western; albeit a surreal one. The second is a love story of redemption and rebirth.

The first half, set in an unnamed desert, opens with El Topo (played by Jodorowsky himself) traveling with his naked young son. They find a town whose citizens have been slaughtered and El Topo hunts down and kills the outlaws and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel and his outlaws had kept captive as a slave. The woman, whom El Topo names Mara, convinces him to defeat the four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land. He duels each of them and during each duel, El Topo emerges victorious through trickery or luck.

After the first duel, an unnamed woman with a male voice finds the couple and offers to serve as a guide. Her involvement will prove El Topo's downfall. Ridden with guilt, El Topo destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed those masters. The unnamed woman then confronts El Topo and shoots him multiple times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then betrays him and rides off with the woman after shooting El Topo.

The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts. In their underground community he meditates on the "four lessons" and when he awakes, he is 'born again'. He decides to help the outcasts escape their subterranean prison and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighbouring town to raise money to buy dynamite for this cause.

At the same time, a mysterious monk arrives in town and becomes the new priest. It is revealed that the new priest is actually El Topo's own son. He threatens to kill El Topo, but decides to spare El Topo's life until he finishes digging the escape for the underground people. With the help of his girlfriend and son, El Topo digs an exit out of the cave. Just as the exit appears, the underground people flee the mountain and are massacred by the cultists.

El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being murdered by the cultists and is shot himself. He ignores his wounds and massacres the cultists in the town. After all are killed, El Topo takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. El Topo's son and girlfriend survive the massacre and make a grave for his remains, which becomes as much a beehive as the first gun master's grave. His dwarf girlfriend gives birth to their child at the same time as his death, and the son of El Topo, now dressed in his father's garments, the dwarf, and the child ride off on a horse in the same fashion that the Son of El Topo and El Topo had in the beginning of the film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067866/