Another labor of lunacy from the maker of El Topo — and his temperature would appear to have not come down any in the prior two decades. There's a dwarf, a knife-thrower, a tattooed lady, a white-faced deaf-mute, an elephant with a nosebleed (soon followed by an elephant funeral with a coffin the size of a Winnebago), an outlaw religious cult formed around a dismembered rape victim (the leader of which gets similarly, and of course "poetically," dismembered herself), etc., etc. There are, to come at it another way, traces of Fellini (him especially), Buñuel, Herzog, Rocha, Tod Browning (most notably The Unknown, the circus film about the sideshow freak, Lon Chaney, who deliberately has his arms pulled from their sockets by horses in order to make himself more appealing to the molestation victim, Joan Crawford, who can't bear to be touched). Exclusively, that is, Outer Edge types of filmmakers, solitary explorers in terra incognita. Only a man of Jodorowsky's vision, a man of his boldness, his passion, his folly, his inanity, could imagine that those bits of Outer Edge could be combined into one continuous Great Wall of Outerness, and still hold together and hold interest. Yet for all its freedom and outrageousness, for all its air of Anything Can Happen, it's a strangely stagnant phantasmagoria: the sad curse of a visionary without a visual sense. Nothing, indeed, which happens in the movie is stranger than that strange stagnancy with which everything in it happens. Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Axel Jodorowsky. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
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