South of Heaven

Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2022)

With CGI taking so much prominence in today's animated features, it's refreshing to see the return of stop-motion again with Mad God; even more so since it's intended for a mature audience. It's a method that has a far more human element to it, which makes it endearing than any computer generated creation, regardless of how surreal it potenitally is. It's the reason why creations by Phil Tippett are still so appealling today. So then, where do you even begin when tasked with even describing Tippett's labour of love project which stretches back over thirty years? Insanity and suffering. Pure and simple.

From the opening text which quotes a passage from the book of Leviticus, the viewer experiences a relentless assault of hellish imagery, which will make you thankful for it's relatively short run time of eighty-three minutes. A diving bell descends down towards an apocalyptic landscape; it's passenger, a cyberpunk style assassin dangerously navigating through the depths of Hell. Twisted and grotesque lifeforms inhabit the various levels he descends further down. While the viewer attempts to process these various nightmare surroundings, they are made privvy to the complete insanity and senseless destruction of Mad God's inhabitants. Life is stripped away so horrificly, it begins to feel so senselessly comedic at times.

This has to be the most breath taking, yet extreme film I've watched so far this year and would be hard pressed to top for the remainder. In terms of visual style, it's like Aardman Animations consumed loads of ketamine while drawing inspiration from Hieronymous Bosch paintings tattooed inside their corneas. Each scene is pure uncut nightmare fuel. The series of vignettes which compose of the film, containing characters ranging from The Assassins, The Surgeon, The Last Man (played by Alex Cox) and The Alchemist, all procedurally flow on from one another. This results into being bludgeoned with examples of gruesome destruction without providing any respite. Truth be told, it's almost alarming that this disturbingly grotesque project would be lying dormant in the twisted mind of Phil Tippett for so long; on the other hand, I find his horrific endeavour entirely commendable for maintaining such focus all this length of time.

Mad God has no real dialogue; garbled gibberish serve as the odd scenes of speech you get to hear. There are plenty of other sounds though, particularly the baby cries emanating from a mutant looking worm ripped from the chest of its host. The sounds of baby crying always sound very distressing; this occurs in the feature for a particularly long time and will test the mettle of anyone. This example, along with the absurdedly perpetual suffering and destruction of the denizens who appear in the animated feature make this a tough watch, even for a seasoned horror head like me. It would be entirely fair to label this an example of extreme cinema, but it's nowhere near as exploitative than some of the crop it will get lumped with. Actions are the only real narrative, as a result its fundamental message might appear somewhat abstract and open to interpretation for its viewers. Although, I find its meaning far more transparent than plenty of older surrealist works which I still fail to comprehend. 

I absolutely loved it. It's taken me ages to put my final thoughts together since it's so uniquely abstract it's taken a longer than usual period to process it. It's a film to marinate over a bit longer than usual since it's so unconventional. Is Mad God Phil Tippett's magnum opus? Possibly. A thoroughly demented labour of love like this doesn't really come along very often, does it?