The Dance Of Reality (18)

Artificial Eye, £15.99

The Hourglass Sanatorium (15)

Mr Bongo, £12.99

Although it features a character who sings all her lines in a dramatic soprano voice, another who sells ice cream in flavours of earth, wind, fire and water and a wandering band of musicians composed of limbless ex-miners dressed in combat fatigues, Alejandro Jodorowsky's 2012 film The Dance Of Reality is actually one of the most straightforward examples of his work you're likely to find.

That's partly due to its autobiographical nature, but also because much of the the rest of the Chilean director's back catalogue is so bloody-mindedly surreal. The last two films he made – Tusk in 1980 and 1990's The Rainbow Thief – may be an exception to the rule, but they're also little seen these days. Instead, the 86-year-old's reputation as the king of the head trip lies with the three films he made between 1968 and 1974: Fando Y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain. As the famous story goes, John Lennon loved El Topo so much he persuaded the Beatles' manager, Allen Klein, to buy the rights to it and put $1 million of his own money into the production of The Holy Mountain.

Amusingly, there's a John Lennon-type figure in The Dance Of Reality, one of the left-wing conspirators the young Alejandro's on-screen father takes up with as he plots to assassinate Chile's right-wing president. This takes place against a backdrop of economic crisis (we're in the 1930s), anti-Semitism (the Jodorowskys are Ukrainian Jews) and social unrest. Typically, however, it's all presented in a carnivalesqe whirl of colour heightened by its author's unrelentingly odd image-making.

Playing Jodorowsky's father, and adding another layer of meaning to the autobiographical element, is the director's own son Brontis, while the striking-looking Jodorowsky appears himself from time to time as a sort of supernatural narrator figure.

Extras include a short on-stage interview with Jodorowsky conducted at the Cannes Film Festival. It's most notable, however, for its master of ceremonies: Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, who describes the sprightly octogenarian as "the last king of cinema."

In the same year that Jodorowsky released The Holy Mountain, Polish film-maker Wojciech Has was making a film every bit as surreal and wonderful. The Hourglass Sanatorium is based on a collection of short stories by Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz whose ultimate fate – shot by the Nazis in the Drohobycz ghetto in 1942 – informs the haunting opening scenes as a man travels on a sort of ghost train to a crumbling rural sanatorium where his father is dying. What follows is a kaleidoscopic journey through time and history which probably owes as much to Lewis Carroll – and, who knows, maybe even Alejandro Jodorowsky – as it does the original source material. The film featured in the recent Masterpieces Of Polish Cinema season which screened in Scotland, and this Blu-Ray edition from Mr Bongo is that same newly-restored version.