MAD GOD (2021)

Studio:      Shudder
Director:    Phil Tippett
Writer:      Phil Tippett
Producer:  Phil Tippett
Stars:     Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda, Arne Hain, Jake Freytag, David Lauer, Hans Brekke, Tom Gibbons

Review Score:

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Summary:

A mysterious man encounters macabre milieus filled with monsters and mutants while exploring the ruins of a fantastical world.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

A gas-masked assassin rides a diving bell down to the ruins of a fantastical world. After he traverses landscapes populated by gnomes, captive animals, faceless factory drones, and mutant monsters, a creature attacks and captures the assassin.

A surgeon dissects the assassin. Among the books and jewelry removed from the assassin’s body, the surgeon pulls out a baby monster that he hands to a nurse.

In the world above, the Last Man gives a map forged by witches to another assassin and sends him down in another diving bell. Driving a motorcycle and then a jeep, the assassin follows the map through a munitions depot, a graveyard, and a warzone before descending down a spiral roadway.

The nurse brings the baby to a floating creature who escorts the child to an alchemist’s lair. The alchemist grinds the baby into liquid, smelts the liquid into metal, and crushes the metal into crystals that he hands back to the creature.

The creature scatters the crystals into a fiery portal. A new universe forms that rapidly decays into another ruined world.

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Review:

Google can steer you toward the whole behind-the-scenes affair should you feel you need in-depth details. But no coverage of “Mad God” would be complete without at least some background on how this peculiar animated fantasy film came to be.

Even if you don’t know Phil Tippett’s name off the top of your head, you’ve definitely seen his work. As an award-winning miniature maker and effects artist, Tippett has helped bring a multitude of movie monsters and machines to life starting with the classic dejarik scene in “Star Wars” and continuing all the way through being a dinosaur consultant on “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.” Tippett’s keen eye for kooky creatures has been applied to ED-209 in “RoboCop,” the alien arachnids of “Starship Troopers,” even “Twilight’s” sparkling vampires.

In 1987, Tippett began building “Mad God,” a personal playground where the FX maestro could perform stop-motion experiments on handmade puppets and props born from his wildest nightmares. The project went on the shelf once Tippett Studio’s professional business took off. Twenty years later, employees encouraged Tippett to resurrect “Mad God.” He did. With help from whomever volunteered to give up a weekend here or there, Tippett began piecing his deranged dream back together the same way any DIY indie filmmaker does with family and friends in a backyard.

Also like any other indie filmmaker, Tippett turned to Kickstarter to find finishing funds in 2013. Fans ponied up a small six-figure sum. After 18 months of toiling with toys, tools, and trash, Tippett’s team released “Mad God’s” first 12-minute installment. The mixed-media movie continued adding new chapters for online consumption until 2021, when “Mad God” at last assumed its final form as a feature that took almost 35 years to complete.

So what is “Mad God” exactly? Ask 10 different people who’ve seen it and you’ll probably receive 10 different responses.

“Mad God” has only a very loose narrative. So loose in fact, it’s not really worth summarizing let alone thinking of “Mad God” as a linear story. There’s no meaningful dialogue either, just grunts, groans, and some garbled babble. Taken in traditional terms, “Mad God” is a completely non-commercial exercise in stream-of-consciousness cinema. No studio would ever touch it with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole.

Picture a place where Alice’s Wonderland, Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory intersect. Now picture a population of masturbating marionettes, massive monsters shoveling sh*t, faceless factory drones committing suicide, and colossal captives creating downpours of excrement as electric chair toilets cause them to lose control of oversized bowels. Whatever mental image those two sentences just inspired is all you need to see to know if “Mad God” is a trip into twistedness you’re willing to risk.

Don’t take the disgusting descriptors at face value. “Mad God” isn’t designed to be a salaciously perverted gross-out for irreverence’s sake. It is animated art. It’s just of a distinctly bizarre brand. Through the frame of a gas-masked man traversing the ravaged ruins of an unusual underworld, Tippett creates eccentric sequences with a palette whose colors are composed of slime and grime, rust and creosote, and barnacles and brimstone. Like the analog technology Tippett employs, “Mad God” takes place in an anachronistic environment hand-forged from molten fire, tetanus-infused metal, and electric currents of eclectic eeriness.

More than once while watching the movie I thought to myself, “I really ought to be high for this.” “Mad God” is an experience best served neat, literally for the whiskey-drinkers out there, and figuratively for those who want to feel a satisfying burn before the film’s inebriating effects muddle your mind with imaginative imagery that’s alternately weird, witchy, and wicked.

The only ones who won’t be transfixed by “Mad God’s” mesmeric madness are any unfortunately uninformed souls who wander into the film by mistake. Play the movie on mute as background entertainment while hosting a party. Every now and again you can get a quick hit of amusement by watching a guest catch a clip out of the corner of an eye while mouthing, “What the fu…” with a scrunched face. For the rest of us who are fans of dementedly-designed miniatures, old-school animation styles, and midnight movie oddities, “Mad God” soars as a one-of-a-kind vision from a one-of-a-kind creator.

Review Score: 75

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