The Holy Mountain

[BrandonKendall 2]

I humbly ask Amy and Devin to look at the flower, look at the flower, for the first time, loooook aht de flowher.

[FelipeSobreiro 54]

I second some bizarro midnight movies being discussed, Holy Mountain is a good one...

[NathanGordon 1096]

Genuinely one of my favorite films, not only for its crazy imagination and surreal imagery but for the sheer audacity of it. I can barely believe that the things depicted in this film actually took place, were acted and filmed, and assembled into a finished product. Along with Herzog's Fitzcaraldo, The Holy Mountain is one of the great feats of filmmaking -- a perfect storm of youthful energy, primal abandon, single-minded work ethic, and ideas that any sane person (or cast, or crew) would laugh at, then run away screaming from.

 

I paid like $40 for a bootleg VHS of this from eBay back in 1998 or so -- I still have it somewhere -- The Holy Mountain was the rare cult film that lived up to the video store rental guy saying "holy shit, have you ever heard of this crazy movie called...". In fact, I remember the place I first rented this from in Seattle had a small "cult/rare movie" shelf with videos that actually required a cash deposit in order to rent; The Holy Mountain was one of them.

 

I love the ending to this film. I find it less mind blowing than I did back in the 90s, but to me it's the perfect finale -- the Alchemist, the director himself, revealing the ultimate secret. In a lesser film it'd be a joke (and indeed it is, in Monty Python's The Holy Grail) but here it truly feels earned, relevant, and cathartic. "Prisoners! We shall break the illusion!"

 

To me it is a canon film, without a doubt. A canon without The Holy Mountain is a canon without impossible dreamers like Herzog, Pasolini, Zulawski, or even the Coppola of Apocalypse Now.

[Weirdlaugh 2]

I'd prefer Danza de la Realidad to Holy Mountain, especially if paired with El Topo (ET feels, upon numerous watches of both ET and HM, the more truthful of the two films and Danza a perfect compliment to the anger in ET).