Mad God

A pas­sion project 30 years in the mak­ing – it was start­ed dur­ing 1990’s Robo­Cop 2, shelved, picked up again, and then final­ly devel­oped with Kick­starter fund­ing – Mad God’s pro­duc­tion odyssey feels ful­ly reflect­ed on screen. It’s a film that con­tin­u­al­ly evolves before your eyes, a liv­ing, fleshy, hor­ri­fy­ing object borne from the mind of Phil Tip­pett, a stop-motion ani­ma­tor best known for his effects work on Star Wars, Robo­Cop and Juras­sic Park.

With a non-ver­bal nar­ra­tive struc­tured accord­ing to its creator’s fren­zied night­mare log­ic, the film’s sto­ry is always in ser­vice of macabre visu­als that feel plucked from a William Blake paint­ing and thrown togeth­er with what­ev­er was lying around in Tippett’s garage. The direc­tor has attrib­uted the project’s pro­longed devel­op­ment to him let­ting dif­fer­ent ideas and inspi­ra­tions per­co­late over time; the result plays as a hybrid of The Broth­ers Quay and Tippett’s own past projects.

There’s a grim­i­ness to the film’s design that sets it apart from most con­tem­po­rary stop-motion work. Where some­thing like Cora­line was spooky and unset­tling, Mad God is inten­tion­al­ly ugly, fus­ing meat, flu­id and rust­ed met­al to nau­se­at­ing effect. Bod­ies are crushed by a vari­ety of objects, mulched by giant indus­tri­al juicers to feed some mon­strous… thing. Crea­tures with mouths full of what seem to be actu­al den­tures crush what­ev­er is in their path. And that’s just the first 10 minutes.

Through that vio­lence, Mad God feels like it’s exor­cis­ing humanity’s sins and self-destruc­tive impuls­es all at once. Open­ing with fan­fare and what looks like a crude fac­sim­i­le of the Tow­er of Babel, the film instant­ly feels mon­u­men­tal thanks to its incred­i­ble sound design (along with some pret­ty great com­posit­ing), despite our acute aware­ness of its hand-craft­ed nature and the actu­al scale of the pup­pets. The film’s lofty notions extend to an intense atmos­phere of reli­gios­i­ty, start­ing with a pas­sage from Leviti­cus scrolling down the screen, heed­ing apoc­a­lypse: ​“Your land shall become a des­o­la­tion and your cities a ruin.”

Mad God duly descends into that ruin, a world with its own macabre social struc­ture but one which is only explained visu­al­ly. There’s no dia­logue, just floaty prog music accom­pa­ny­ing an unnamed masked man – known only as The Assas­sin – as he descends. Tip­pett obfus­cates his film’s nar­ra­tive in a way that only adds to its awe-inspir­ing ter­ror. There’s no dis­cernible plot oth­er than The Assas­sin try­ing to take a suit­case full of dyna­mite… some­where, side­step­ping var­i­ous hor­rors on the way.

Tip­pett reveals the machi­na­tions of this sprawl­ing world through var­i­ous non-sequiturs, such as two ape-like giants hav­ing a glad­i­a­to­r­i­al match, or bug mon­sters gam­bling. Some of these digres­sions don’t entire­ly work – name­ly the ones fea­tur­ing live actors in cos­tume, or when frames are removed from shots to emu­late stop-motion. Long sequences fea­tur­ing a mad, long-nailed sci­en­tist feel like a wheel-spin­ning dis­trac­tion from The Assassin’s Dan­tean jour­ney. At least such moments, which are few and far between, serve as a means to reori­en­tate the viewer.

There’s an over­whelm­ing amount of infor­ma­tion with­out expla­na­tion here, each grotesque lay­er the result of a visu­al artist let loose with time and mon­ey as their only con­straints. It even reach­es a cos­mic and the­o­log­i­cal hor­ror as well as its more earth­ly hor­rors of war, des­o­la­tion and envi­ron­men­tal col­lapse. With its opaque struc­ture and strange man­made mon­sters, Mad God is a delight­ful­ly per­verse and man­gled sto­ry of scrip­ture, like the Watch­mak­er cre­ation anal­o­gy as fil­tered through the minds of Blake and effects mae­stro Ray Harryhausen.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them. But to keep going, and grow­ing, we need your sup­port. Become a mem­ber today.