Holy Crap

I like Netflix because they have an enormous variety of movies in stock and because, if you turn them around quickly, you can get a lot of movies for your monthly membership fee.
But (We saw that coming, didn't we?) they apparently don't want us to see Leni Reifenstahl's 1926 film "The Holy Mountain."
Here's how one reviewer described it on Amazon.com:

If you have never experienced the 1920s German genre of the mountain film, there is no better introduction than this. In fact it may be the only one you need unless you truly love the genre as most of the films are carbon copies of each other. What gives this film added interest is the debut of Leni Riefenstahl as a performer (and occasional director). Riefenstahl began her career as a dancer in the Isadora Duncan mold until a knee injury ended her career. Nevertheless she does a fair amount of dancing in this film especially in the beginning. While it may look somewhat silly today and Riefenstahl is far from the prototype of today's dancers, it is an excellent example of what Duncan's free form dancing was like and some of it is remarkably effective. Director Arnold Fanck wrote the screenplay in three days after being given a photo of Riefenstahl by co-star Louis Trenker and so began her brilliant and highly controversial career. The story (standard for this kind of film) is the classic love triangle with a lot of German mysticism about Man and Nature thrown in to give it "depth." The real star of the film is the stunning cinematography by Hans Schneeberger (how appropriate) and Sepp Allgeier. There are incredible shots of breathtaking beauty of mountain crags and vistas taken in what seem like impossible positions for a cameraman. The actors were really there and labored under the harsh conditions as recalled by Riefenstahl in a clip from a documentary which is also included (although professional climbers were used in the more harrowing sequences). I found myself engrossed by the obvious sincerity of the film despite the shallowness of the storyline. The print is in fairly good shape with the proper tinting restored which enhances the mountain scenes. The new musical score by Aljoscha Zimmerman strikes just the right balance between Classical and New Age depending on what the story requires. While certainly not a film that will appeal to everyone, it is worth seeing for the astonishing photography and for the young Riefenstahl who is radiant in her film debut.

The trouble started about four weeks ago when the red Netflix envelope arrived containing what I expected was The Holy Mountain. The white Tyvek DVD sleeve described synopsized the 1926 classic. But the disc inside was a completely different The Holy Mountain.
It was a bizarre surrealistic 1973 cult film of the same name by director Alejandro Jodorowski:
Here's what another Amazon.com reviewer wrote:

I watched this film with the Jodorowsky subtitled commentary track running and some of the stuff he says is absolutely hilarious, I mean there's no way even Andy Kaufman could have thought of this stuff.
"I want to change the world with film. I want to change the way people think." this one was pure gold. Is he sincerely that burned out and naive? Watching his films is like giving a camera to the homeless, toothless guy who rants and raves about Jesus having a UFO stashed in a garbage can behind a Dairy Queen in some remote Arizona town.
Art is entirely subjective, so with that in mind, this is the most hilarious attempt at surreal "art"; at trying to get the audience to open up to "another state of consciousness", (more gold from the burn out.)
And come on, how is this thing even remotely offensive? (I don't know, maybe it's because I'm an atheist) Oh man, THERE'S FLAMING JESUS POO!!!!! because it symbolizes this, and symbolizes that, and this symoblizes a monkey with a hippo in a pool and some black chick with whacky zany tattoos.
Please, nothing symbolizes anything, because nothing means anything.
Jodorowsky is a hack, plain and simple; get your spiritual garbage out of my universe, hippy.

So you can see the Jodorowsky film isn't exactly what we wanted. I went to the Netflix site and found the closest thing to getting a message to Netflix was to click a button indicating they sent the wrong movie. Then I put a Post-It note onto the DVD sleeve explaining their mistake and sent it back to Netflix in Salt Lake City. A few days later, the replacement arrrived from the Nexflix shipping facility in Houston. Again it was Jodorowski in a Riefenstahl sleeve.
I phoned Netflix and explained to the woman who answered what had happened. She vowed they would get it right.
Today's mail brought yet a third copy of The Holy Mountain - the Riefenstahl version this time.
But the disk is cracked and unplayable.
See what I mean?