I may have said this before, but I have just witnessed THE WEIRDEST movie on Movie Night with my friends. This film, simply titled “The Holy Mountain,” stars a man who I assume to be Jesus Christ and a bunch of strange individuals as they embark on a quest to reach the top of a mountain proclaimed to be holy so they might achieve immortality. If that makes no sense, then you’ll only be more confused as you find out more.

The film opens on a strange ritual being carried out by a man, who wears a black cloak and huge black hat that shrouds his face, on two young naked women. He pretty much just shaves their heads. Then we move to a scene somewhere in South or Central America where a bunch of naked kids tie a guy, who appears in the form of the stereotypical Jesus look, to a cross and throw stones at him. There’s also a quadriplegic there who, after this Jesus guy breaks free, laughs with him about it. Jesus, picks him up and they wander to a nearby town where people are being shot at with paintball guns and birds fly out of the holes made in their shirts.

Jesus gets picked up by some overweight Roman soldiers and they make a mold of him in the position he had been in while on the cross. Using this mold, they mass produce hundreds of copies of him and I assume they sell them to churches. Jesus wakes up on a pile of sweet potatoes, surrounded by these plastic copies. He starts screaming.

This is starting to sound like an overexaggerated version of a Bob Dylan song…

AND THAT’S ONLY THE FIRST 10ish MINUTES OF THIS THING

For the sake of spoilers, I’m not going to go any deeper into this plot. Believe me, what I have described above will not prepare you for all the crazy shit you’ll see as this plot unfolds, should you decide to view the film in its entirety.

Unsurprisingly, this film bombed in the box offices as the general public of 1973 most certainly wasn’t into this crazy drug trip of a movie (not that it would fare any better today). On a $750,000 budget, it only managed a measly $96,000 at box offices worldwide. Of course, if you’d be crazy to have expected anything else from the info above. The makers of this film definitely knew it would bomb, but that’s something I really admire.

Sure, it seems like just a waste of money to make this movie, but really it’s an example of the art meaning more than the price tag. And you may not notice, but that’s a sentiment growing rarer and rarer in the film industry as bigger companies have almost solely been focusing on what can make for the biggest cash cows. The rise in superhero movies of late is proof of this as sequels built off of the originals’ successes have been coming out in droves. Original and daring works are often pushed more to the wayside by these businesses as new directions can turn audiences away much more easily than a rehash of tried and true plots. Take almost any superhero movie in this day and age and it’s really just the exact same story with different flashy colors.

Anyway, enough ranting. Here’s the trailer for this lunatic film if you’re still interested

WARNING: THIS IS HARD TO EXPLAIN TO ANYONE BEHIND YOU IF THEY SEE YOU WATCHING THIS