#20: Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972)

Starting today, I will be posting a short review/summary of the top 20 must crazy, sad, fucked up, strange, or just plain bizarre movies.  A new movie will be posted every day until I reach No 1, at which point new content will have already been created.  So here we go,

This film is the most well-known of the creations of Werner Herzog, who may be recognizable to some of you as the father of Julien in Harmony Korine's "Julien Donkey Boy", and also as the narrator of "Grizzly Man".  The plot involves a troupe of Spanish Conquistadores in the 1500s searching for the fabled city of gold, El Dorado, in the Andes Mountains of South America.  The film starred the strange and volatile Klaus Kinski as the leader Aguirre.  The soundtrack of the movie is very surreal, and the movie features highly experimental camera techniques, as well as a final scene which features Kinski alone in a raft full of chickens after his entire party has now died, gliding down the river hoping to overthrow Pizarro.  Werner Herzog is one of the "weird director" prototypes, among others such as David Lynch, Harmony Korine, and Crispin Glover, and whose films have influenced the work of many of the makers of the movies on this list.