‘Mad God’ Review #2
Stars: Alex Cox, Niketa Roman, Satish Ratakonda, Harper Taylor, Brynn Taylor | Written and Directed by Phil Tippett
Mad God is a stop-motion, post-industrial, post-apocalyptic fever dream. It was brought to us via crowdfunding by Phil Tippett, a man who has Star Wars, Robocop and Jurassic Park in his resume. I assume Phil is the titular Mad God, rather than any of the monsters on display.
Visually, as grim as the views here are, the talent and craft on display here are incredible. The monster design, and the stop motion is all top-notch. There aren’t conventional acts in this film. As I sit here, I am not sure if moving scenes around, at random, twisting the mad rubrics cube would have made any difference. It is an hour and 20 minutes of grim suffering that has little of a linear path (that I can see).
We kick off, with an incredibly compelling opening. A steampunk, first World War-style, soldier descending in his drop pod, while under fire from various steampunk cannons in a hellish exaggeration of the First World War.
Our Pod descends, under the earth and down further still. Our Soldier eventually gets out of the pod, checks his map (that is constantly degrading in his hands) and sets off to find something or somewhere that is, like the rest of the film, only partially explained through inference. There is almost no speaking in the film, and what is there is distorted.
What follows is a film that is unconventional to say the least. Whatever our Soldier is looking for, serves as the MacGuffin, that allows our Soldier to act as our eyes and ears, as we travel past an hour and 20 minutes of nightmare scenarios. Monsters, humanoid (but ever devoid of humanity) creatures and industrial nightmares. It is very hard to really summarize this, but if a young David Lynch made a horror film that meshes monsters with a post-industrial complex, where it is not always clear where monster ends, and machine begins, then perhaps I can explain what this film is like. Stop motion, which occasionally includes real actors (but there is always something “up” with these humans, devoid of their humanity, as they always are.
Monsters, humanoids and tiny little faery creatures bludgeoning, each other, crushing each other with machines, eating or torturing each other and any number of conspicuous cruelties is what we are in for. The most “human” scene we see, is a colourful alien monster thing, feeding a smaller, similar creature, that we can assume is their child. They are naturally feeding their child maggots, as a mutant, hunchback creature (we had already seen torturing two other, different monster creatures with electricity), opens a hatch, that leads to a spider monster, climbing up. The parent monster flees from the Spider monster, allowing their (possible) child monster to be carried off and devoured. This causes the creature to make a noise that sounds a lot like “oh no”. This scene perhaps displays the most humanity in the film and displays quite how strange this film is. The film is full of monsters, as it is monstrous. Humanoids, while withholding the humanity.
My question mark over the film is, is there any substance behind the incredible surface? I have no doubt there is “some kind of plot” here, but how deep that goes I am not sure. Taking us through a nightmare freakshow pop-up book is fine, but what (if anything) did any of it mean? As the film, grinds on, always turned all the way up to 11, my interest waned. In horror you need both the dark and the light, it can’t just be horror after horror after horror and keep a viewer’s interest. There are no stakes here, there is no character development, and we have no understanding or attachment to any of the humanoids or beasts that are endlessly killing each other here, so how can we care? We have no idea how we can feel, other than revolted by suffering and squelching that seems inconsequential, it is so ubiquitous.
What is the secret genius of the Mad God? Like a record from Radiohead, perhaps I must repeat the experience 20 times before it starts to unveil its mysteries to me? The problem is, I don’t have any desire to watch this film again. I barely made it through the 1 hour and 20-minute run time.
I would love a very clever person to mount an impassioned defence of this film and explain to me what it was that I missed, but whatever it was, I completely missed it.
