Mad God Review: Phil Tippett’s Wildly Inventive, Stop-Motion Song of Mourning

Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.

Mad God
Photo: Shudder

Across many modern cinematic fantasies, particularly mainstream American ones, special effects are casually tossed around so as to keep the narratives humming at a frenetic pace. What one may miss is the ability to savor a strange world, say, free from the rigid dictates of rote, incurious plotting. Produced over a period of years, Phil Tippett’s stop-motion extravaganza Mad God seems to have been fashioned specifically to fulfill this desire. Tippett is so fascinated with lurid textures, at the expense of narrative, that his film tips over into an avant-garde realm, suggesting a macabre art exhibit as immersive nightmare.

A humanoid referred to in the credits as the Last Man (Alex Cox), costumed in a kind of warrior outfit that resembles a fusion of deep-sea diving gear and WWII-era military regalia, descends into a strange world on a corroded diving bell. Upon landing somewhere in the deep recesses of a valley, after passing by countless relics and dolls and bric-a-brac that suggest life as lived in a giant attic from hell, the Last Man consults a map. He intends to do…something.

That’s the entire plot of Mad God, as Tippett cannily turns our familiarity with post-apocalyptic lone hero clichés against us. The film has a weird split in sensibility, as its design elements are deliberately derivative, while its tone and structure are despairing and free-associational. It’s as if Tippett, the legendary visual effects guru who worked on many genre milestones, among them Star Wars, RoboCop, Jurassic Park, and Starship Troopers, wanted to give the visions in his mind room to roam and cross-pollinate.

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Presumably on a mission to bring this world to its knees, the Last Man encounters endless atrocities, which he witnesses passively with a mind toward self-preservation above all. This shadowy world is a kind of wasteland, evoking England after the Blitz and the future junkyard world of The Terminator. Conventional human beings are seen mostly in stock footage playing on giant monitors—satirically implying that our species has been reduced to ad fodder for creatures who’ve built upon our talent for narcissism and oppression. Roaming this bombed-out wasteland are a variety of blobby, bladdery creatures with seemingly random teeth and eyes that virtually defy description, and they brutally murder and torture smaller figures that appear to be made out of straw, perhaps intended as a pun on the notion of “straw men.”

This world gets worse the more we see of it, and the association it conjures of the fallout from the Blitz feels less incidental. In ruined buildings, human-looking doctors resembling Nazi scientists cut creatures to pieces, splattering blood across the walls while extracting fetuses that recall the face-hugger from Alien. In one of the film’s most unsettling images, giant figures are liquified by electrical weaponry into a goo that’s greedily consumed by other creatures. In another image, a female prisoner’s torment is indelibly represented by the glassy eyes of the doll playing her. At its best, Tippett’s disorienting representation of human pain with ironically inexpressive dolls, puppets, and props, as well as otherworldly sets, recalls David Lynch’s early shorts, Alan Parker’s Pink Floyd: The Wall, and Todd Haynes’s Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, among many other ecstatic visions of alienation.

At times, it seems as if Tippett is throwing everything at the screen to see what sticks. Though it runs only 83 minutes, Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare. As the Last Man traverses this world, he becomes acquainted with multiple overlapping food chains defined by subjugation and slaughter. There’s no beauty here, and not even any speech, and so the straw people, the only creatures designed by Tippett with a sense of sympathy, zone out in front of TV sets. Like these straw people, our eyes are tickled by the wealth of sensory stimulation that Tippett offers, while our souls are sickened by the carnage and unrelenting hopelessness. Which is to say that Mad God is a compact, despairing, wildly inventive song of mourning.

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Score: 
 Cast: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda  Director: Phil Tippett  Screenwriter: Phil Tippett  Distributor: Shudder  Running Time: 83 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

Chuck Bowen

Chuck Bowen's writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Atlantic, The AV Club, Style Weekly, and other publications.

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