The deity of stop motion serves us a bountiful harvest of bizarre aesthetics and eerie imagery.
I shouldn’t like this movie as much as I do. But I love it.
I’ve complained about this situation in the past, aesthetically pleasing films with very sparse stories. Usually, with films like those, the slick visuals create a sort of crutch to fill the substantive void that an actual compelling story would give. It would feel lazy. But with Phil Tippet’s Mad God, the movie’s narrative is barebones and better off for it, because everything in the film is oozing passion. Part of me wants there to be more of a story here, but I know deep inside that to add one would run counter to the point of it all.
– Mad God – Photo Credit: Shudder
Since I first watched this featurette on the film’s creation back in high school, I’ve hopelessly waited for a release of the full Mad God film on home media. This film, 30 years in the making, after thousands of hours of manpower and countless models, is about the spectacle of it all. You get taken along by the emotion of a desolate journey instead of more coherent thoughts.
We follow The Assassins of the Last Man on their mission to destroy the underworld they’ve been sent into, and we’re forced to feel their misery in the task. You find yourself trying to keep a grip on the handholds alongside the gas-mask clad world killers who climb down many layers of a grisly hell (and if this isn’t hell, I’d hate to see what it looks like for them) without a single word of reassurance to keep you company.
Mad God isn’t here to hold your hand and tell you about a fantastic legend beyond its fantastic visuals; it’s a mythically grimdark showcase, first and foremost, of how both incredible and horrible things can be done with the medium of stop motion animation.
– Mad God – Photo Credit: Shudder
So, what does this showcase have for us visually? A dieselpunk meets eldritch horror aesthetic, with ick-inducing detail on every pore and strand of hair for the creatures we see. Industrial landscapes that have had life breathed into them and living things that seem to have all their humanity taken away is what’s being served here. Everything in this movie is in a tragically good-looking state of decay. An undeniable and downright sickening nastiness to the film that you can’t look away from. It’s not a car crash or a trainwreck that pulls in onlookers; it’s a clash of these gargantuan monstrosities of flesh and metal trading hammering blows, giving you a violent duel that you’re forced to keep watching in astonishment.
There are moments of sweeping camerawork that you rarely see in movies nowadays unless they’re filmed on soundstages plastered in greenscreen and drowning in CGI. The magnitude of these sets is immense for something so small, and the way Tippett and company light and colors the scenes is just phenomenal.
And while it doesn’t have an explicit storyline, the film thematically (intentionally or otherwise) dwells on the indifference of industry, the callousness of technology against humans, and our autonomy as humans. This is rife for analysis, so expect countless video essays and reviews when people pick up on it.
– Mad God – Photo Credit: Shudder
There is some cinematic dissonance with the second half of the film as we follow the second Assassin, with a sharp change in lighting that can take you out of things. After all, the movie began on 35mm film and eventually finished with digital cameras and using newer techniques, something Tippet himself anticipated issues with. But once you readjust, you get treated to some of the film’s most enjoyable sequences; specifically, the neon splattered bottle world kept in the Alchemist’s laboratory comes to mind.
Assassin – Mad God – Photo Credit: Shudder
BOTTOMLINE: This is one of those rare opportunities where an auteur filmmaker’s pure passion carries the entire endeavor without slipping into a kind of black hole of pretension. I honestly never thought I’d have the pleasure of seeing this film outside of a film festival. And now that I have seen it, I’m telling you, you must see it to truly believe the excellent insanity of Phil Tippett’s Mad God.