It’s very difficult to describe the experience of Phil Tippett’s stop-motion animation masterpiece, Mad God, a true work of art so brilliant, epic, and grotesque, that it would make Dali and Bosch blush. It is a purely visionary film, and art for the sake of art. This film is like a sculpture or a symphony: you don’t look for a plot. When you look at some genius’ brilliant yet indescribable work of art, narrative loses its importance, and Mad God is no different, a disturbing piece of art that neither has nor needs a clear narrative.
A plot synopsis is either impossible or pointless here, with the film moving through different vignettes exploring a nightmare world of war and death. The world in the film is a Hell, a disturbing, brutal, bloody, dirty, filthy, obscene, dark, grimy, cesspool populated by a group of insane monsters that defy description.
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What is Mad God?
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The Assassin travels through Hell, continuously descending with a briefcase of dynamite into worlds filled with more and more decay. In these worlds, mutilation and vivisection pass as entertainment, and a surgeon mutilates the Assassin before a cheering audience, ripping out his guts and the viscera inside his body, including a monstrous creature that cries like a human baby. We see mushroom clouds in the film, so it is possible this disgusting creatures are mutations of some sort. A nurse delivers the baby to the alchemist, who kills the baby by crushing and liquefying it, then heating up the liquid, which is turned into an obelisk of metal, which is then crushed into glittery pieces that go on to create an entire new universe.
Of course, this new universe starts to decay and atrophy as soon as it is born, which seems to be the fate humanity is doomed to. What the Assassin and his replacement see in their travels is a whole lot of war, torture, execution, brutality, feces, filth, and murder. Things decay and turn to dust. Everything dies.
Mad God, streaming now on Shudder, is a world unto itself, a singularly dark and disturbing vision of madness, war, murder, destruction, dehumanization, and filth. If you’re in the right mindset, the film is downright artisanal (literally handmade), and beautiful in its depiction of dirty, brutal violence. It is one of the boldest artistic statements made in recent years, and should make the kind of waves in the horror and special effects community that a young Picasso made in the art world. Like a lot of great art, it isn’t easy (or possible) to understand; even with repeated viewings, you still might not know what you’ve witnessed, just that you were fortunate enough to se something this artful, this powerful.
Phil Tippett Spent 30 Years Making Mad God
Filmed over a period of more than 30 years, it is Phil Tippett’s labor of love and a genuine piece of art. Tippett is the genius behind this madhouse of macabre mayhem, writing, directing, designing the sets, controlling the stop-motion animation, hand-painting the characters and sets, and more. His name appears in the credits over and over. He is a world-recognized pioneer who has worked on such classics as The Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Jurassic Park, RoboCop, RoboCop 2, Starship Troopers, and more, winning two Academy Awards, an Emmy, and a reputation as one of the best visual effects artists of all time.
The handmade effects of Mad God is so superior to all of his previous work, because this time he is not just the visual artist but the writer, director, and auteur behind this remarkable and remarkably bleak explosion of innovation and style. Mad God is truly high art, transcending the fact that it is a film and becoming a unique piece of unadulterated creativity.
When not working on Hollywood blockbusters, Tippett spent his nights and weekends putting this work of art together, beginning in 1987 and finishing in 2020 (with the film only now officially released on Shudder, back in June). He began the project in a brief lull between two films he worked on, RoboCop 2 and Jurassic Park, and designed the sets and built the characters obsessively on and off. He shows himself to be an auteur of the highest order, reminding one of David Lynch, Hieronymus Bosch, Salvador Dalí, William S Burroughs, Franz Kafka, David Cronenberg, Stanley Kubrick, Edward Munch, Philip K. Dick, H.R. Geiger, Takashi Miike, Joe Coleman, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and other envelope-pushing, experimental geniuses.
Mad God is a Brilliant Work of Art on Shudder
In fact, the analogue between Tippett and some of Lynch’s work is pretty appropriate. One may have the same reaction to Mad God as one has with Twin Peaks’ third season, or with his debut feature film Eraserhead. When you are finished, you might have little understanding of what has just transpired, but you will likely be absolutely blown away by this brilliant and brutal work of art, a film that can be instantly described as a 21st century cult classic without having to wait a generation to see if it still holds up.
The material is so inherently original, terrifying, unique, and groundbreaking that, like the third season of Twin Peaks, it seems almost obvious that it will stand the test of time as a film which reveals more brilliance when watched twice or even a third and fourth time, as the viewer searches for nuances and subtleties missed on the first viewings. Mad God is also like Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights in the sense that one can experience it over the course of a lifetime and never get bored. The word ’experience’ is used because this is not a movie you passively watch, but one that draws you in and immerses you in its own world. Even though it deals with negative topical concepts like war and dehumanization, it will make you forget about everything as its dark brutal beauty assaults all your senses.
Who is the Mad God?
The film’s title is self-referential; it is Phil Tippett who is the Mad God. The Biblical god created the universe in six days. It took Tippett 33 years to create his universe. In the credits, he is mentioned as writer, director, producer, director of photography, animation producer, additional editor, and visual effects’ supervisor. Although many people were involved, it is Phil Tippett’s vision. It is an intensely personal film, as Tippett lets us see what is inside his head and gives us access to the universe that he magically created, using stop-motion animation and other visual effects.
Throughout this film, there is endless destruction. Time moves on, things decay, until new worlds are created, recycled from old worlds, just as new life is recycled from dead things. The obelisk made from the baby and the film’s far-out psychedelic ending recalls Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. In fact, Tippett has performed some of his artistic work while under the influence of LSD. These metal obelisks appear throughout the film, at times falling on and crushing humanoid-type life forms, and thus seem a lot more misanthropic than the obelisks of Kubrick: these dark rectangles only bring violence, not civilization.
There are many types of creatures in Mad God, and only a few actual humans. Alex Cox, director of Repo Man and Sid and Nancy (and co-writer of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) plays The Last Human, an eccentric-looking man with incredibly long fingernails and toenails, and who seems to work in a laboratory while also controlling a massive army. Cox gives a great performance as this strange contradiction of a man. The film has little to no dialogue, and Cox does nothing but grunt and make strange sounds. The performance is primal, but this is ultimately Tippett’s film.
Mad God is the 21st Century Dante’s Inferno
As we get deeper into the mind of the Mad God, the film descends as well, and we follow creatures who are constantly descending levels, as if navigating through Dante’s nine layers of hell. The only constants are decay, the passage of time, the needless destruction of life by warring factions, and undignified death.
In some scenes, the creatures are part organic animal and part mechanical, as we see in David Cronenberg films such as eXistenZ, where video games merge with flesh. There are other instances of Cronenbergian body horror, with a gross plethora disgusting creatures. There is also a theme of bodily waste, and at one point we see two creatures wearing masks fighting each other with shovels before being compelled to shovel great piles of feces, which must be symbolic of how Tippett views mankind. Actually, the whole of Mad God is likely representative of how Tippett views humanity - ugly, violent, cruel, and pointless.
Mad God is a unique visionary film, a traumatic acid trip, an extraordinary experience, and a masterwork of art, and that is why it is required viewing.
