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....the official version is available to pre-order here although search is still only bringing up the bootleg page.

Anchor Bay will release a special limited edition collector's box set, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, on DVD on 5/1/2007(SRP $49.98). The set will contain El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis on DVD, fully restored and remastered from new HD transfers in anamorphic widescreen video, with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio (El Topo is 125 minutes in Spanish, The Holy Mountain is 114 minutes in English, Fando Y Lis is 93 minutes in Spanish). The box set will also include 2 music CDs containing the soundtracks for El Topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as a DVD of Jodorowsky's never-before-released first film, La Cravate. El Topo and The Holy Mountain will also be available separately (SRP $24.98 each). The El Topo DVD will contain audio commentary by the director, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), a 2006 on-camera interview with the director as well as an exclusive new interview, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. The Holy Mountain DVD will include audio commentary with the director, deleted scenes with commentary, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), the Tarot short with commentary, a restoration process short, restoration credits, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. Fando Y Lis will include audio commentary with the director and the La Constellation Jodorowsky documentary. Subtitles on the discs will be available in English, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.

Ready to tumble down the proverbial rabbit hole?
Alejandro Jodorowsky artfully fornicates with your fragile expectations and relaxed perceptions with this collection of unrestrained attacks on your senses. Never a dull or a normal moment, he constantly tries to challenge and provoke you with his shocking imagery.

This boxed set offers 4 of his finest achievements--La Cravate, Fando y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain. They are all engaging, controversial, and odd pieces of art. They seem like psychedilic paintings in pepetual motion. Lots of violence and strong sexual imagery. Plus plenty of moments deemed extremely sacrilegious by many at the time. AJ was a ballsy director that didn't try to appeal to the masses. He uses vivid allegory while juggling illusion and truth. Plus I love how he basically pisses on the standard formulas of filmmaking.

The madness originated from Chile, Jodorowsky is known as the father of the midnight movies

Wait until the official version is available to pre-order :

Anchor Bay will release a special limited edition collector's box set, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, on DVD on 5/1/2007(SRP $49.98). The set will contain El Topo, The Holy Mountain and Fando Y Lis on DVD, fully restored and remastered from new HD transfers in anamorphic widescreen video, with Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 audio (El Topo is 125 minutes in Spanish, The Holy Mountain is 114 minutes in English, Fando Y Lis is 93 minutes in Spanish). The box set will also include 2 music CDs containing the soundtracks for El Topo and The Holy Mountain, as well as a DVD of Jodorowsky's never-before-released first film, La Cravate. El Topo and The Holy Mountain will also be available separately (SRP $24.98 each). The El Topo DVD will contain audio commentary by the director, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), a 2006 on-camera interview with the director as well as an exclusive new interview, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. The Holy Mountain DVD will include audio commentary with the director, deleted scenes with commentary, the original theatrical trailer (with English voice-over), the Tarot short with commentary, a restoration process short, restoration credits, a photo gallery and original script excerpts. Fando Y Lis will include audio commentary with the director and the La Constellation Jodorowsky documentary. Subtitles on the discs will be available in English, French, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese.


Added 3/11/07
It's available for pre-order on another listing .Searching
by title still not working but searching the ASIN:# : B000NY1E9E will
bring up the correct page


Or try browsing through new and future releases from the April 17th and beyond

The REAL El Topo by Alexandro Jodorowsky is excellent for fans of cult films. Stange, violent imagery, weird nudity, an all around great film. Contact me about this and other films.

Every time you see the mexican film EL TOPO on video it is always a bootleg. Even at the video store for rental. The same holds true for THE HOLY MOUNTAIN and the Beatles LET IT BE. They are all three owned by apple records ceo Allen Klein, and he won't even return Alejandro Jorodofsky's phone calls to put them on video. What is Klein waiting for? They are on Japanese laserdisk which is the source of the vhs copies, and just like napster, Jorodofsky encourages film buffs to seek these films out anyway they can! Santa Sangre is on video, however.

Today is the big day!

After thirty years or more of wrangling, ABKCO films releases the big box set of Alejandro Jodorowsky's films including El Topo and Holy Mountain. Once touted by people like John and Yoko, Jodorowsky's films have been more talked about than seen since the brouhaha with rights began, so this package brings these stories once more to a wide audience.

How to describe them? Or even Jodorowsky himself? One of the later surrealists, he dedicated himself to using art for both psychological and spiritual means as well as artistic. His films explore the ways we encounter the disruptions of life on a grand scale. His obsessions with mystic visions and physical deformity bring a strange ambience to his surreal cinematic works, like a strange melding of Todd Browning and Maya Deren. El Topo explores mysticism through the spaghetti western (and along the way critiques the construction of masculinity in Western culture) while Holy Mountain dives even deeper into the mystic to confront the horrors of modern life with a surrealistic spin that anticipates the complaisant acceptance of post-modernism (and this in the mid-1970s!).

The box also includes the seldom seen Fando y Lis as well as the soundtracks for both of the better known films. The images are crisp and clear and will be a revelation to those who have only seen the films via third generation bootlegs or much-worn 35mm. The films still pack a whallop* even all these years later. Vision is such a rare quality.

*Gentle viewers may want to be warned that films from this time period did not have the same RSPCA/ASPCA requirements. Much of the animal carnage is not simulated, which can be rather gruesome.

Through weird circumstances, I saw El Topo 3 times when I was 13 years old.
THIS IS NOT A FILM FOR 13 YEAR OLDS!. Unless you want to introduce them to
a way of thinking that is incredibly expansive, confusing(in a good way)
and ripe. It's violent, it's disturbing, it's mind blowing (and I don't
use that phrase easily). I am convinced that seeing it just when I was
starting to be a teenager, changed the way I think.
The director, Alejandro Jodorowsky said in an interview, that this film is like taking
acid, someone can give you the tab, but they can't give you the trip. Over
the years, I would see El Topo whenever it came to a revival house and
always I would get more out of it. I could never really say I understood
it better, but it would always set the gears running.
This is not to say that there is no story to follow. Ostensibly it's the story of a gun
slinger who wants to challenge the great master gunslingers to see if he is
the best. That's the first 1/2. The second 1/2 is almost like a different
film except it reflects a complete spiritual rebirth of the gunslinger. I
remember reading something that said the film was divided into Old
Testament and New Testament.
If you want to think, be surprised and fascinated, be disgusted and
delighted, be challenged and changed, see this film. It's definitely a film
worth owning because you will want to see it several times.

Jodorowsky has gone on to being a bit of a leader of a philosophical group
in Paris as well as one of the most respected writers of French Comics-
which is an entirely different, and in some ways more respected genre than
in the States

By its very nature, art is subjective. What seems like art to one person may just be drivel to another. The inherent difficulty in defining art makes it easy to hide behind it as a label for almost any act of real or faked creativity. Which makes judgment of the DVD boxed set, The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky, complicated. Is Jodorowsky a true cinematic artist, or is he just a producer of New-Age-ish gobbledygook? Opinions vary.

The most prominent of Jodorowsky's movies is El Topo (Spanish for "The Mole") which at least initially has the look of a Spaghetti Western. A man-in-black gunfighter travels by horse with his naked son. (Why is he naked? There may be a symbolic reason, but don't look for much in the way of literal explanations in Jodorowsky's works.) The gunfighter comes across a massacre and deals with the killers, and takes a lover who provokes him to take on the four Master Gunfighters, a challenge that will lead to unintended consequences. Among the three movies in the set, El Topo is the most easily accessible for the casual viewer, but it is also more than a little weird: one master gunfighter is blind and attended to by two men, one armless and one legless who together act as one person (in fact, Jodorowsky has many "freaks" in his films, and like his predecessor Tod Browning, typically views them as people of virtue); another gunfighter lives in a secluded, incestuous relationship with his mother.

Made prior to El Topo is Fando y Lis, a tale of a couple who are on a journey to a mystical holy city called Tar. Fando is a man tormented by what is probably sexual impotence and takes out his rage with various cruelties to his girlfriend, the paraplegic Lis. Their journey is akin to a trip through hell as they wander a blighted landscape and encounter various madmen and villains. The farther they go, the meaner Fando gets; in a way, it is the typical abuser-abusee relationship with him apologetic for his sins and her taking his abuse because she's utterly dependent on him.

Strangest of all the movies is The Holy Mountain, a strange mix of various religious and pseudoscientific (like astrology, tarot and alchemy) ideas. A thief who is also a Christ-like figure wanders a city and eventually comes into the lair of an alchemist who offers enlightenment. The thief will join a band of other people (each representing a different planet) on an excursion to The Holy Mountain where immortality awaits.

There are some themes that run through these three movies, particularly the search for spiritual enlightenment. The outsiders in society - such as freaks and prostitutes - are generally forces of good, while establishment figures - especially the idle rich - are monsters. But generally, the movies are so abstract that each person will get his or her own meaning out of it.

In addition to the three movies, the set does have a lot of extras, including commentaries, trailers, two soundtrack CDs (for El Topo and The Holy Mountain), a short film, La Cravate which is Jodorowsky's first work (and which, though strange, is also rather straightforward) and a documentary La Constellation - Jodorowsky, which adoringly treats the director as something of a modern guru.

These films are not for everyone. If you find David Lynch too odd for your tastes, than you should skip Jodorowsky. Also, although these films are unrated, it is safe to say that if they were, they'd likely be NC-17, so they are not family films. Personally, I liked the films, though I agree with one critic who pointed out more-or-less that just because something is beyond comprehension doesn't make it profound. I found the best way to enjoy these movies is to not try and make sense of them and just take pleasure in the visual spectacle and sheer bizarreness of them. And visually, these are fantastic movies unlike anything else out there.

The CD Soundtracks: Excellent! El Topo is about 36 minutes and The Holy Mountain is over an hour and is rich in variety with excellent sound quality. You will listen to them long after your first viewings of the films.

The Movies: Excellent quality prints! Bravo!!! Rich color and clean black and whites.

The Titles:

La Cravate: A bizarre, surrealist story in color. It's funny, and transcendently strange.

Fando y Lis: A fairy tale gone wrong in black and white. The desert in the film is so dry, it will make you thirsty, so keep something to drink nearby. It's a confrontationally honest film, so be prepared.

El Topo: A lifetime journey of a western gunfighter in color. You see the child become the inner child of the man and the effects of a myriad of life events upon him as he ages and must uphold his reputation as a tough guy. It is a very unique look at masculinity and how it comes to be for the character.

The Holy Mountain: A fairy tale transfigured in color. A surreal examination of spirituality amidst commerce and the insanity of the human race. It's poignant and funny all rolled into one. Life will make much more sense after you see it.

The Package: As a whole, *wow*!!! The thin packs are great and the text on the cases is relevant and concise.

incredible set. I had the priviledge of seeing El Topo and The Holy Mountain on the big screen prior to the dvd release and it really changed how i look at film. its hard to describe the power these films have but if you let them wash over you they will truly move you. ive tried showing these to some of my friends and they get confused and grossed out so this is definately not for everyone. but if you area cinema enthusiast these could change your life. the dvds are very nice video quality considering how these films were unseen for many years in america. el cravate and fando y lis are intereting though not up to the standard of el topo and the holy mountain but very nice to have them here. the commentaries are great to listen too Alejandro is a very interesting man and i look forward to his next project.