In the early 1960s, Alejandro Jodorowsky, in collaboration with Fernando Arrabal and Roland Topor, produced theatrical happenings that were part Grand Guignol, part Theater Of Cruelty and, in the case of splatterfests like Melodrama Sacramental, something like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre on peyote. Calling themselves the Panic Movement, the three provocateurs attempted to shatter the fourth wall with more than just words and gestures - they were going for something more visceral: blood and guts - anything to close the distance between spectacle and spectator and to wake and alert the audience to the suffering, inequality and untruths engulfing them in this modern world gone mad. Yes, life stinks and so should art. The Panic Movement put the “fart” in artsy fartsy - a steaming turd in the cosmic punchbowl.

Jodorowsky and company’s sacramental melodrama was staged in Paris, May of 1965, the same month and year that the largest Vietnam teach-in was held (May 21–23, 1965) at UC Berkeley, one of the seminal events in the history of the American anti-war movement, the first rumblings of a protest movement against the Vietnam war that would grow to a deafening roar. Was Jodorowsky’s “happening”  also a a mirroring of the savagery of war and a metaphor for the lives being sacrificed in Vietnam? Were the prophets of peace in synch and sending signals to each other from two epicenters of radical change?

In Melodrama Sacramental we see images that would be repeated in Jodorowsky’s epic mindfucker El Topo, another nightmare ode to man’s inhumanity to man.

On the soundtrack we hear Allen Ginsberg reading from his poem “Lysergic Acid,” written in San Francisco in 1959.