Long-suffering passion projects from filmmakers have, to be generous, a spotty success rate. For every triumph like The Irishman (2019), there are a slew of corresponding duds like Battlefield Earth (2000) or The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). It’s easy to trace how the overdose of creative fervor necessary to power on through the stalls and roadblocks inherent in these films can blind their stewards from intrinsic failings. Therefore, I approached Phil Tippett’s Mad God (2022) with a dollop of reservation. Tippett, whose special effects handiwork shines in everything from Star Wars (1977) to the Twilight movies, started work on his stop-motion film 30 years ago. He shelved it while working on Jurassic Park (1993), but began working again in recent years. It is with great joy and relief that I come to you and say that the wait was worth it.
Mad God is broadly unconcerned with any semblance of traditional narrative structure. We enter Tippett’s mad world through an opening sequence reminiscent of Moses on Mt. Sinai followed by a long scroll featuring a passage from Leviticus. From there, we follow the Assassin, named only as such in the credits, as they descend through layers of horrid earth in a small, metal capsule. Reminiscent of a particular Italian epic, the Assassin spirals downward through increasingly demonic iterations of creatures, hellfire, and mechanized horrors. As they venture deeper, we discover remnants suggesting this may once have been a world similar to ours but is now a desolate inferno. With a remarkable commitment to surreal poetics, Tippett mounts a twisted rumination on the endless cycles of agony we pass unto each other and the world around us.
If you’ve read that synopsis and find yourself thinking “What the fuck?” I wouldn’t blame you. Phantasmagorical stop-motion horror is admittedly not the most approachable of media. Nonetheless, Mad God is the type of film that rewards your investment in parsing through its complexities. A professor and dear friend of mine once said of poetry that it is often meant to be felt before it is understood, and I gladly co-opt that when I consider films that slant surreal or absurd. It’s impossible not to feel something engaging with Mad God, a filmic world that Tippett has constructed to engage the viewer’s senses on an animalistic level. There’s no dialogue, but there are clanging gears, screaming creatures, and no fewer than three dozen interpretations of a body getting squelched into the ground. Mad God is cinema viscera of the highest order.
The calling card here though is the stop-motion and corresponding production design. Tippett constructs his layers of hellscape as a Hieronymous Bosch painting come to life. Each new level the Assassin discovers brings with it fresh horrors. In one, a bandaged snake man hooks a bipedal lump of tissue and teeth only to be cut in half by a much larger creature caught somewhere between a pig and a humanized tick. Deeper on, the Assassin discovers a monkey strapped to a surgical chair while a creature that looks like a melted Barbie doll seemingly masturbates in the corner. Like Bosch centuries before him, Tippett does away with any laws of order or sense in favor of grotesque imagery that cuts directly to the darkest centers of human imagination. Mad God may never explicitly call the realm hell, but it nonetheless stands in for humanity’s fears of a ruthless, immoral, wasteland.
Mad God is also easily one of the grossest and grimiest projects I’ve ever encountered. Tippett approaches viscera and fluids with a delight that is, frankly, aspirational. The common denominator across each level is the commitment to incorporating the gooey bits of a destroyed civilization. In one scene that will haunt my nightmares for eons, giant bodies are strapped into electric contraptions that liquefy them. What’s left drains down a funnel into the gaping maw of a disembodied head that in turn channels the goop into hanging, bloody, bulges fit with eyes. It is a stunning example of the macabre ingenuity that defines Mad God as a singular achievement. Tippett maintaining unparalleled stop-motion creativity over an hour and twenty-minute runtime constructed over 30 years is simply mind-blowing.
Adding it all up, and factoring in a closing sequence that recreates a Big Bang-like moment before showing us the new world’s collapse, Mad God is a punishing and apocalyptic vision of humanity. There is no salvation to be found. That level of cynicism about the human ability to better life could be off-putting, but in a time when populaces and governments alike find new ways to fail the human cause, Tippett’s hideous poetics feel apt. Mad God may not be a fun watch, but it is nonetheless an awe-inspiring ordeal, a chance to experience the vision of a creative genius wholly committed to the craft.
Mad God is currently available to stream exclusively on Shudder.
Phil Tippett's 'Mad God' (2022) is nothing short of unbridled and macabre genius.
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GVN Rating 8
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Devin McGrath-Conwell holds a B.A. in Film / English from Middlebury College and is currently pursuing an MFA in Screenwriting from Emerson College. His obsessions include all things horror, David Lynch, the darkest of satires, and Billy Joel. Devin’s writing has also appeared in publications such as Filmhounds Magazine, Film Cred, Horror Homeroom, and Cinema Scholars.