El Topo

Midnight Classics! 35mm print!

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s legendary, notorious cult hit arguably created the genre of the midnight movie — a spectacle so stunning and bizarre that normal hours couldn’t contain it. Melding influences from tarot reading to the Bible to surrealist art into a mind-blowing acid-trip western, Jodorowsky cast himself as the leather-clad gunman, El Topo (‘the mole’), who wanders through a desert strewn with mystical symbols on an unnamed quest, leaving blood and carnage in his wake. Declared a masterpiece at its release by John Lennon, El Topo tops even the most outrageous aesthetic experiments of its era and remains unmatched in its strange beauty and radical provocations.

The Union Cinema is on the second floor of the UW-Milwaukee Student Union building.