Mad God(2022) doesn't exactly have a plot. Rather, the 83 minute stop-motion animated picture consists of five narrative blocks or episodes that loop back to the film's beginning. These five sequences follow an introduction that invokes Fritz Lang's Metropolis -- we see the spiral shaft of the Tower of Babel and, then, a text from Leviticus in which God promises to unleash his full wrath on mankind and leave both cities and landscapes utterly desolate. This text appears on a piece of what seems to be vellum that is smeared and burnt around the edges. In the first sequence, a capsule dangling on a sort of spider-web drops through a leaden sky, barely escaping motorized automaton howitzers that shell it. The capsule is occupied by a homunculus, a figure with goggles and a military helmet who seems to have a carburetor for nose and mouth; the homunculus wears a green World War One great-coat to which are strapped various utility belts. He has boots on his feet that make a squelching sound as he traipses about the hellscape into which the capsule has been dropped. Various monsters are staggering around macerating each other and huge greasy devices that look like plastic injection molding machines are disgorging armies of fibrous, faceless zombies. The zombies, marching in columns, stumble around, periodically being crushed or ripped to shreds by giant machines -- it's as if they are navigating a sort of foundry lethal with ladles full of flaming lava and immense power-presses that leak some sort of gelatinous mucous. After evading a dozen or so mutilated monsters with maws full of bloody teeth, some creature assaults the homunculus from behind and he vanishes. Throughout his adventure, the homunculus has been consulting a completely unintelligible map that seems to have been charred to the point that it falls apart, breaking into tiny scraps of paper. In the second episode, a velvet curtain rises to display a torture-porn shadow play. (This block of narrative uses distressed film stock and looks a bit like Guy Maddin's movies or, even, some scenes in David Lynch's work>) Aftert this theatrical overture, the film tours a torture hospital where maniacal doctors are boring holes through writhing figures with red bulging eyes strapped to gurneys. A couple doctors disembowel a figure, rooting around for five minutes in his guts where they find internal organs, loops of intestine, and piles of gold and diamond jewelry. The guts of the tortured figure are inexhaustible and the doctors pile up a heap of gore that is about six feet tall before uncovering a larval baby without limbs but with the mouth of some sort of lamprey. The baby cries as a nurse carries the little creature in bloody blanket down an endless hall where the mutilated victims of medical experiments wriggle and tremble in the shadows. In the third section, another homunculus like the little explorer in the first part appears; first, clambering out of another capsule that looks like a white piston dangling from a spider's web. This homunculus first tries to ride a bike which crumbles under him. (He also carries a shredded unintelligible map that falls to pieces in hands.) Then, he finds a jeep, hot wires it, and drives around a blasted landscape where tanks are belching fire at each other and the horizon is lurid with mushroom clouds. The homunculus enters a sodden, rotting library where he finds a briefcase containing an old-style cartoon time bomb. He sets the clock and tries to get the thing to explode but here time seems arrested (it's a stop motion film after all) and the bomb ignite. The fourth episode features a figure that I will dub Tumor Face. Tumor Face looks a bit like the Elephant Man, John Merrick, although worse -- his visage is a mass of dangling, engorged and ulcerated tumors decorated by a single glaring eyeball. Tumor Face supervises two monsters, flayed humanoid figures, who wear wire-mesh masks on their faces -- the two figures smash each other with cudgels while Tumor Face amuses himself by zapping them with fiery yellow bolts of electricity plugged into their electrically conductive face masks. Tumor-Face digs around in piles of books and seems to be conducting alchemical experiments in his laboratory. (There is also a live-action alchemist.) Meanwhile, back at Torture Hospital, the wild-eyed nurse (also live-action) hands the larval slug baby with the gaping jaws to a figure that I call Medusa-Flail monster. Medusa Flail monster glides along levitated about four feet above the slag heaps and shrubs of contorted wire, a creature with a pointed beak, metal button eyes, and a huge clerical hat, flat as a table, from which tendrils of flailing writhing tentacles envelope the figure in a cloud of serpentine excrescences. Medusa Flail monster is literally indescribable and, I should add, rather elegant. Medusa Flail monster glides through the hell-scape for awhile before delivering the toothy maggot baby, still wreathed in maternal (?) gore to Tumor-Face. Tumor-Face puts the howling baby in a sort of vice, crushes the infant to pulp, and, then, pours the pulp into a mold to create ingots. The ingots are, then, ground into a glittering cosmic dust. In the last episode, the cosmic dust turns into a rain of meteors plowing into a barren moonscape. The meteorites seed the cratered planet and, in the scope of a few minutes, the place is swarming with life. From this life, some sort of sentient beings evolve and they build an enormous city of chalk-white skyscrapers, one stacked upon another, the screen filled with pale monoliths. A war follows and the skyscrapers are pulverized into ruins where monstrous mutants trot around murdering one another. A clock is ticking -- this is the briefcase with the time-bomb, some dynamite wired together. The time-bomb explodes. The film ends with a shot of the alchemist standing on a sort of platform surrounded by a hundred identical homunculus figures. One of them clambers into a piston-shaped capsule that is, then, lowered into a vast abyss, dangling from what seems to be a spider-web, thereby, closing the loop with the images with which this story (if that's what it is) began.
The film is obsessively detailed. Every shot is crammed with pustulant, suppurating filth: mazes of tangled circuitry, heaps of skulls and bones over which bat-like creatures flutter. In some scenes, mangled statuary lie in immense garbage dumps, busts of Beethoven and Aristotle piled with Chinese terracotta soldiers and marble figures that might have been imagined by Bernini. There are gigantic shafts with ramps leading into the center of the earth, pools of magma, caverns that seem like they are made from glittering charcoal or graphite. The surface of the landscape is excoriated, seared, fissured -- many of the scenes take place in front of what seem to be giant paintings by Anselm Kiefer that have been stored for a thousand years in a wet basement full of mildew. There are coils of fecal mud everywhere, torrents of gelatinous fluid, and homicidal slime-monsters everywhere. At one point, the screen suddenly lights up with day-glow psychedelic colors -- we're in a fungal garden that is brilliantly colored where jolly-looking blobs with vaginal toothy mouths are merrily eating one another. The whole thing is hideous or hideously beautiful depending upon your perspective -- one thing is clear: you can't look away from the whole awful decomposing spectacle.
Mad God is the work of Phil Tippett, one of Hollywood's most renowned visual effects artists (VFX); Tippet worked on Jurassic Park, Robo-Cop, Starship Troopers, and The Return of the Jedi to name just a few of his credits. Mad God is a labor of love, created by mostly unpaid assistants over a period of thirty years. Tippet began the film when he was on a hiatus from film work after doing the VFX for Robo-Cop. He continued the labor until the film was finally complete (after Kick-starter funding) in 2021 where it was premiered in Italy at the Locarno Film Festival. The pervasive atmosphere of horror and despair in Mad God reflects Tippett's understanding that his astonishing talents are now obsolete, an anachronism in the face of computer generated effects that are now ubiquitous and dominant in the film industry. In some ways, Tippett's movie is the majestic last hurrah of the stop-motion animation that brought King Kong to life and that was perfected by Ray Harryhausen in feature films like Jason and the Argonauts, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and Clash of the Titans (one of my personal favorites), a 1981 picture that is generally regarded as the last important puppet animation (stop-frame animation) film to be widely distributed. Tippett was influenced by Harryhausen and has devoted his life to engineering effects of the sort that cinema no longer needs -- one three-minute sequence in Mad God required three years in production. (Jan Svankmeyer, the Czech stop-motion animator, in pictures like Little Otik and Faust has created similarly grotesque and memorable films -- but his work is outside of the Hollywood mainstream and best regarded as experimental in character.) The Mad God in the film is, I think, both Jehovah and Tippett brooding over his puppet universe, pulling its strings, and creating the simulacram of life from inanimate matter. Similarly, the figure of the alchemist who dominates some scenes in the movie (a live-action character) seems to be a surrogate for Tippett. The epithet "mad" is also personal and significant. A year before the film was released, Tippett suffered a mental breakdown, had to be hospitalized in a closed psychiatric facility, and was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. (He's on medication now that regulates his moods.) It's generally a mistake to argue that an artist's personal afflictions are mirrored in his or her work. Schubert's Winterreise is far more than a portrait of the composer's syphilis. Similarly, Tippett's Mad God is a triumphant disturbing work in its own right, logical and carefully constructed according to its own grotesque logic, and, certainly, can't be explained by the director's mental illness. But it's hard not to read into the horrific imagery in the film, gestated for 30 years, something of the artist's plight -- more, I think, a reflection of the assault on his system of imagery by CGI than any aspect of his psychopathology but, nonetheless, something deeply personal to the film maker. Mad God is not for most filmgoers -- it's too horrible and radical; but it has to be seen to be believed.
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