40
The pacing and action sequences are staged in a manner reminiscent of a spaghetti western and are quite good, but the allegories are too much and too many.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
60
There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.
75
Chicago Reader by Jonathan Rosenbaum
More enjoyable for its unending string of outrages than for its capacity to make coherent sense.
75
Chicago Tribune by Michael Wilmington
One of the classic midnight movies of the Pink Flamingos -- Rocky Horror era, star-director Jodorowsky's metaphysical western about a violent wanderer plays like an especially gun-crazy Sergio Leone saga filtered through several layers of radical European/Latin American cinema and Christian and Buddhist mysticism. Zero cool in its day, it remains a striking film oddity. [16 Feb 2007, p.C4]
67
El Topo is never boring, but neither does it hit the trippy heights of something like The Saragossa Manuscript, or the best of Luis Buñuel and Federico Fellini. And with its emphasis on one virile stud's journey to manhood—with women grasping at his cloak—El Topo isn't just drippily New Age-y, it also offers the kind of stealthy paternalism common to the counterculture.
100
Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert
The film exists as an unforgettable experience, but not as a comprehensible one.