Director: Phil Tippett
84 minutes (18) 2021
Acorn / Shudder Blu-ray
[Released 5th December]
Rating: 9/10
Review by Christopher Geary
Is the curious art of stop-motion animation due for a revival? It’s not often that animated films get adult certificates, but Mad God is a prime example of a winningly experimental form. It’s dazzling movie-making by Phil Tippett, who did stop-motion effects for ED-209 in RoboCop (1987), and its gloomy sci-fi horror is more than inventive enough to deliver a weirdly composed, wholly anarchic, underworld mythos, influenced by Czech directors Karel Zeman and Jan Svankmajer, and also David Lynch’s amazingly bizarre Eraserhead (1977). There’s plenty of muttering, and highly emotive vocal effects, but no dialogue to denote characters. Expressions or body-language conceal as much as they communicate directly, yet lots of brutal judgements and obvious misery are messaged.
A pet-project begun 30 years ago, this production was shelved when its model animation style became unfashionable in the 1990s, as computers conquered the studios’ tool-kits. Jungian psychology is a recurring theme here, much like anything by Jodorowsky, while writer-director Tippett crafts a dynamic yet brooding quest-saga combo, with Art-house references and uncanny genre riffs that emerge rapidly during a blitz-o-mation of grisly or surreal images. Mad God concerns a ‘terrorist’ carrying a time-bomb, but it’s a mission-movie only in the sense that a Quay brothers’ narrative, like Street Of Crocodiles (1986), tells any kind of biographical story. Just imagine a disturbing Hieronymus Bosch puppet-show version of something stranger called ‘Escape From Noo-Yuck’, where nothing more than cruelty and misfortune favours the bold.
The killer descends into and through the bowels of a hell-scape where bio-mecha terrors, and mutant grotesques, casually churn up waves of relentlessly violent splatter effects. There’s an eye-rolling despair here, with creatures born only to die horribly struck by a meaningless fate, while the protagonist discovers evidence of many other predecessors, and drives on through an apocalyptic war-zone of rusty tank battles. Astonishingly eerie black-comedy tracts readily evoke Terry Gilliam’s wildest fantasies of doomed heroism, particularly 12 Monkeys (1995). Alex Cox, auteur of Repo Man (1984), essays a loony boffin displaying Coffin-Joe styled fingernails, as an apparent dictator of a shadowy militaristic realm, far above the subterranean levels where the cursed assassin journeys into a ghastly, gothic labyrinth of death-traps and damnation alleys.
Mad God is like garage-Harryhausen meets grind-house Giger, bored with fantastic alien erotica. A nurse (Niketa Roman) rescues a mewling newborn... something, but even that nightmare nativity offers nothing to hope for as this multicultural wasteland devours any chance of evolution. Picture factory-ruins extruding huge slabs, perhaps cousins of those famed monoliths of Kubrick’s magnum opus, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), for a line soon toppled over like giant dominoes, and later tumbling like cosmic dice thrown out of a yawning Black Hole. Tippett’s masterly approach to mysteriously horrific absurdities ensures a 100% cult movie. Don’t blink, or you’ll miss some amusing bits of extraordinarily gruesome fun.
This excellent Blu-ray includes a first-class
package of bonus material:
- Commentary track by Phil Tippett and Guillermo del Toro
- Cast & crew commentary
- Interview with Tippett
- Mad God influences & inspirations
- Maya Tippett’s The Making Of Mad God
- Maya Tippett’s Worse Than The Demon
- Academy of Art University & Mad God
- Behind-the-scenes montage
- Behind-the-scenes photo gallery
