The movie takes place in two parts. The first half, in an unnamed spaghetti western inspired desert, opens with El Topo and his naked son riding a horse. He tells his son that he is now seven years old, and must bury his first toy and a picture of his mother in the sand. The movie starts as El Topo plays his flute.
Part 1
During their journey, they find a lifeless town with all the inhabitants killed and mutilated (including the farm animals). El Topo avenges the town by hunting down and killing the outlaws who butchered the townsfolk. They find out that the outlaws are under the command of a Colonel who has taken another small town with a monastery and its inhabitants as hostage. El Topo rescues the town from the Colonel and his outlaws, only to abandon his son with the monks.
Mara convinces El Topo to defeat the four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land.
-The first duel is with a blind man with the voice of a woman, dressed in only a thong and guarded by a man with no legs riding a man with no arms. The man claims to be impervious to bullets, stating that he offers them "no resistance", and even demonstrates this ability. El Topo slays the man by setting a man hole trap for the master so that he loses concentration, and Mara kills the remaining two half-men.
-The second gunslinger is some sort of a traveling gypsy, accompanied by his mother and a lion. After initially beating El Topo in a duel, the large man shows El Topo how he came to be so powerful. He tells El Topo that he strengthened his fingers by working with copper and later on by creating delicate objects like toothpick pyramids. He also tells El Topo that the reason he is alive and powerful is because he has his mother whom he loves and takes care of, while El Topo, unlike him, is all alone in this world, only living to destroy others. Afterwards the man decides to give the black gunslinger one more chance. While walking away, El Topo places Mara's mirror shards on the ground. The massive man's mother, whom the man is obsessed with, gives El Topo his revolver and then steps on the mirror shards. Concerned with his mother, the brute forgets about his duel with El Topo. The man in black then shoots the gypsy gunslinger in the back of his head.
-The third gun master is found at a rabbit farm. The rabbit shepherd is rather unconcerned with the man in black and his mission, and tells him that as soon as he arrived at the rabbit farm, the rabbits began to die. They both shared a moment of peace together by playing music to each other, because music can tell a person's character more than word the master says. They then compared to each other the way they shoot by shooting at crows. El Topo's bullet hit the crow's head while the master shot the heart of the bird. Afterward, they start the duel, and the master shoots El Topo in the chest knocking him down. However, El Topo stands up, laughing, unfazed from the bullet. He then shoots the defenseless rabbit farmer, since his gun can only fire one bullet at a time. El Topo then pulls a copper plate from his coat—a gift from the previous gun master. Although El Topo won the duel by cheating, he starts to question his own morality.
-El Topo comes to the last, and most spartan, gun master. The man wears only a small loin cloth and his ghost gray hair comes down to his waist. Next to him is a butterfly net. El Topo wishes to duel him, but the man says that he has no pistol, having traded it away years ago for the net. The two then get in a fistfight where El Topo is unable to connect a single blow. Frustrated, El Topo attempts to shoot the man, who catches the bullets in his butterfly net and throws them back at the man in black. Realizing that he finally was beaten as he couldn't kill the last master, El Topo gives up in frustration. In tears, the master then asks El Topo if his life is really worth taking. The master then takes the pistol away from El Topo and kills himself in a demonstration of the unimportance of life, declaring, "You have lost!"
Part 2
The second half of the movie takes place years later, after El Topo is rescued by a band of deformed outcasts, saving him from death. The outcasts take El Topo to their underground community, where, comatose, he meditates on the four lessons for many years. When he awakes, he is 'born again,' and shaves off all his beard and hair and wears light, simple clothing (similar to Buddhist clothing). He decides to help the outcasts, and, together with a dwarven girl who looked after him while he was comatose, goes on a quest to free them from their subterranean prison.
The son of El Topo, dressed in black similar to his father in the past, decides to spare El Topo's life until he finishes digging the exit for the underground people. However, he will follow El Topo's every step. For a while, the life of these three is working hard and living together happily as a family for once. Some time passes, and the dwarven girl is shown to be pregnant.
With the help of his dwarf girlfriend and his son, El Topo digs an exit out of the cave. Just as the exit appears, the underground people start to run out of the mountain, to which El Topo ominously cries, "They are not ready for you!" The son of El Topo also cannot kill his father/master and decides to let it go. The underground people near the town, where the cultists are waiting for them with guns. El Topo helplessly witnesses his community being murdered by the cultists and is shot by the cultists himself. In a fit of rage, and as possessed by God, he ignores the pain from several fatal bullet wounds and proceeds to take a rifle and kills all of the cultists in the town, men and women, old and young. Some townspeople flee the town en masse, including the slaves. After everybody in town is killed, El Topo takes an oil lamp and pours oil on himself and sets himself on fire, an act reflecting the self-immolation of Buddhist monks and others that were protesting the Vietnam War, which was still going on at the time of the filming.
El Topo's son and girlfriend survive the ordeal and made a grave for his remains, which becomes a beehive full of honey, like the first gun master's grave. Since his dwarf girlfriend gives birth to their child at the same time as his death, the ending may lead some to believe that the child is the reincarnation of the gunslinger-turned-monk (borrowing the Buddhism idea). The son of El Topo, now dressed in his father's garments, the dwarf, and the child ride off on a horse in the same fashion that the Son of El Topo and El Topo did in the beginning of the film.
This is a very good mexican movie, I really love this movie. Directed, produced and starring by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1970
