Movie Review The Holy Mountain

The Holy Mountain (1973) 

Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Written by Alejandro Jodorowsky 

Starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas Zamira Salinas 

November 27th, 1973 

Published May 15th, 2023 

Is Holy Mountain a movie or an experience? Perhaps it is both. I'm not sure exactly what it is but it had a major effect on me. Written and directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the movie is a wildly political, deeply esoteric and visually daring film of extraordinary ambition. Watching Holy Mountain is what I imagine it must be like to be drunk. I've never had a drop of alcohol but observing drunken behavior, I am reminded of how I felt watching Holy Mountain. The film left me dizzy, delirious, occasionally giddy and left me needing a nap. 

Every frame of Holy Mountain could be a painting. Jodorowsky's taken for composition is extraordinary. The opening moments of the film both set the tone for the rest of the movie and do nothing to establish a recognizable story. Two nude women kneel next to a black clad person wearing a large black hat. The background is a psychedelic black and white. The person in the black hat proceeds to brutally and painfully sheer the hair from the women's heads. Why? I don't know but it is damn sure a striking series of visuals. 

Our protagonist in Holy Mountain is a man who vaguely visually associates with Jesus just before he was nailed to the cross. He has long brown hair, a beard, and a lanky, emaciated frame. Our Jesus stand-in is introduced lying in his own filth. Covered in flies, urine flowing around him, and  a general air of gross, the man is awakened when a bunch of naked children start throwing rocks at him. He flees. Eventually, our Jesus meets a tiny man with no legs or hands and the two become fast friends. 

They travel to town where they witness a series of indescribable events that include a recreation of the fall of the Mayan people with the Mayans represented by Lizards and the invading Spanish portrayed by a plague level of frogs. The frogs destroy and consume the lizards as Jesus and his friend dance about. Meanwhile, soldiers arrive to break up the scene and one of the tourists breaks off to have sex with the soldier while her husband watches and calls on Jesus to capture the event on camera. 

Eventually, our Jesus stand in realizes that his resemblance to Jesus could be a way to make some money. He begins accepting money to carry a giant cross while tourists snap photos of him. However, when he falls asleep, he's kidnapped by the same people who gave him the cross to carry. They proceed to make a plaster cast of him as Jesus on the cross and when our Jesus awakens, he finds a room full of plaster versions of himself as Jesus and suffers intense despair before destroying all but one of these plaster Jesus's. 

I have left out so many things. You have no idea. And what I have described thus far is maybe 20 minutes into the movie, at most. Holy Mountain only gets wilder from here with sequences that it would take pages to try and summarize and then assess the meaning. Let's just say that what is still to come in Holy Mountain amounts to a series of artist allegories regarding corporate greed, violence, sexism, religious corruption, the death of the ego and the overall idea of what it means to transcend in the Emerson/Thoreau sense. 

It's a lot and I am not sure I understood a lot of it or what I was meant to understand. Jodorowsky appears to want the viewer to take something away from Holy Mountain that is just for them. At the same time, he's not without a very personal, political perspective. Much of that boils down to greed is bad, corruption is bad, and everyone is susceptible to these societal ills. We can try to assign more depth to Jodorowsky but the basic message is a leftist perspective that is deeply opposed to the corrupting influence of capitalism and generally suspicious of anything that represents a capitalistic status quo. 

Find my full length review of The Holy Mountain at Geeks.Media. 

Movie Review Monica

Monica (2023) 

Directed by Andrea Pallaoro 

Written by Andrea Pallaoro 

Starring Trace Lysette, Emily Browning, Patricia Clarkson, Adriana Barraza, Joshua Close 

Release Date May 12th, 2023 

Published May 12th, 2023 

Monica is a quiet, thoughtful, and quite brilliant film about grief and the strange pull parents have on children, no matter the distance. It doesn't matter if the distance is measured in miles or time, the inherent desire to connect with parents is a universal feeling, regardless of your background. In the case of Monica (Trace Lysette), the distance is physical, it's measured in decades of time, and it's embedded in bitter sadness and grief. Monica has been estranged from her mother, Eugenia (Patricia Clarkson) for nearly 20 years. The last thing Monica's mother said to her, at a bus station in Ohio was "I can no longer be your mother." 

Now, Eugenia is dying and having been found by her brother, Paul (Josh Close), and his wife, Laura (Emily Browning), that pull I wrote about earlier surfaces for Monica. Despite the rightful bitterness and remarkable hurt, Monica cannot resist the pull of seeing her mother again before she passes away. The question of a reconciliation looms but carries more weight in this case. Eugenia is suffering from brain cancer, her mind is slipping, especially when she refuses her medication. It's been nearly 20 years and she may not recognize Monica. 

Of course, time and Eugenia's illness aren't the only reasons why she might not recognize Monica. When the two last saw each other, Monica was at the beginning of transitioning. 20 years later, Monica is indeed a different person. The layers of this story are remarkable as now Monica may have to decide if she will tell her mother that she is her child, the child Eugenia abandoned at a crucial moment in her life. It's heavy stuff but in the brilliantly subtle hands of writer-director Andrea Pallaoro and star Trace Lysette, the fraught emotions are played only on Monica's face as she takes in the huge emotions at play inside her and around her. 

Find my full length review at Humans.Media 

Horror in the 90s: The Exorcist 3

The Exorcist 3 (1990) 

Directed by William Peter Blatty 

Written by William Peter Blatty 

Starring George C. Scott, Brad Dourif, Scott Wilson, Nicol Williamson

Release Date August 17th, 1990 

Box Office $44 million 

People forget just how big a hit The Exorcist 3 was when it was released in August of 1990. William Peter Blatty's first and only directorial effort managed to top the box office on opening weekend and accumulated overall, a gross that would be over $100 million dollars today. Despite much negative reaction to the film at the time, The Exorcist 3 has persisted in the minds of horror fans as a rare third sequel in a famous franchise that doesn't stink out loud. 

The Exorcist 3 centers on a Police Detective, Lt. William F. Kinderman, played by legendary actor George C. Scott. Kinderman recalls having been at the scene of the crime when in 1975 Father Damian Karras plunged to his death from the apartment window of young Regan MacNeil after having participated in Regan's exorcism. It's a horrific memory that Kinderman shares with Father Karras' close friend, Father Joseph Dyer (Ed Flanders). And it's a memory that creeps back into both men's minds when a series of murders occur that recall a demonically possessed killer. 

In 2020, The Exorcist 3 turned 30 years old and on my podcast, the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast, we watched it and reviewed it on the show. Our review was incredibly positive. We loved George C. Scott's performance and the wild horror imagery of William Peter Blatty's shabby but endearing first time direction. Watching the film again, a mere 3 years later however, the charm is less pronounced. What steps forward are the flaws, the strange choices, the reasons the normies of 1990 hated this movie. 

It's sad but it appears to be true that I willed myself to like The Exorcist 3 so much in 2020 that I neglected just how weird and random William Peter Blatty's choices are. First of all, one of the first images of The Exorcist 3 is a jarringly silly shot that is intended to be frightening. Church doors fly open, and an ill-wind blows through the church, creating a chaotic swirl of loose hymnals and biblical verses. The camera slides into the chaos before cutting to a close up of a cross where a ceramic Jesus of Nazareth comically opens his eyes. The image of Jesus here looks like comedian Tom Kenny and the horror spell that Blatty is trying to cast fails immediately. 

This is followed by an attempt to give The Exorcist 3 the feel of a waking nightmare. The camera leaves the church and takes on a first person perspective, as if we are the camera and we are in the midst of a dream. We are walking down a wet street late at night. In the distance, a man who appears to be wearing a Priest's garb runs quickly and strangely across the street. The camera moves up and down with each step, the camera, our eyes, fall upon the sidewalk before us. A young man appears to the left of the frame holding a rose. We walk past him and continue up the street. The young man emerges again somehow having teleported to a spot ahead of us. He holds out the flower and we walk past. 

We then leap to a new location, the steps from Georgetown below the former home of Regan MacNeil. It's the place where Father Karras died after leaping from a fourth story window. We, the camera, roll down those stairs just as Father Karras did, rolling and bouncing horrifically until we reach the bottom, and there the nightmare ends. We awaken to helicopters intercut with scenes from the church. Our protagonists, Lt. Kinderman and Father Dyer going about their business. Kinderman is investigating a grisly murder scene. Father Dyer is practicing a sermon and scolding a student priest, played in a cameo by a very young, almost unrecognizable Kevin Corrigan, a favorite character of mine. 

The visual marriage of Lt. Kinderman and Father Dyer is accompanied by dialogue that establishes the long-time friendship of these two men. It's a friendship bound in the blood of their dead friend Father Karras. it's established that each man is haunted by this date, the date of Father Karras's death. They are haunted so much that they each feel the need to comfort the other. Each man talks of having to cheer up their old friend and thus they meet at a local movie theater for an umpteenth showing of It's a Wonderful Life. 

One can infer that Blatty is intending to evoke the life-affirming emotional power of It's a Wonderful Life to underline how these two men appreciate being alive. Other than that, it's a particularly random inclusion. The movie date is followed by a bizarre non-sequitur conversation in which the detective relates a story about why he doesn't want to go him to his wife and mother-in-law. It's a story about a fish currently occupying Kinderman's bathtub and how he hasn't had a bath in 3 days because the fish is there. This is the pretense Blatty feels is necessary to get Kinderman and Dyer to have dinner together and rehash stories about Father Karras and Kinderman's strange new murder case. 

Not to be Mr. IMDB trivia, but, as we cut to the restaurant in the following scene, there is an entirely random and uncommented upon cameo from a famous non-actor. Glimpsed ever so briefly in this scene is the former United States Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop. Most won't recognize the man but if you are of a certain age, his oddly styled beard, a style referred to as a chinstrap, as it circles the face without including a mustache, is a strangely familiar sight. Koop became famous in the late 80s and early 90s when he defied the Reagan and Bush administrations to openly discuss AIDS. He spoke of safe sex and promoted condoms at a time when it was not something conservatives wanted him to do. 

That's a wordy way of saying that spotting C. Everett Koop in a brief cameo in The Exorcist 3 is weird and quite distracting for someone who knows who he is. Perhaps the former Surgeon General was invited because he shared a prominent Letter C with star George C. Scott. These are the kinds of bizarre intrusive thoughts that such random inclusions invite. And they are a warning to future filmmakers, try to minimize such distracting cameos in your movie as they might pull focus from what you are trying to accomplish in a scene. 

Find my full length piece at Horror.Media