Mad God

dir: Phil Tippet

2022

I’ll be honest with you – sometimes I have no fucking idea what’s going on in life or in movies.

Watching Mad God, allegedly a labour of love or a magnum opus or something that this stop motion animator has been working on for 30 years, I honestly had not the faintest idea as to what I was watching.

I know I was watching stop motion animation, which is a trip in and of itself. And I guess it’s ‘good’ stop motion animation? I don’t really know. When I watch something with stop motion, like Henry Selick’s stuff or the stuff put out by Laika Studios, I don’t judge whether I like the movie or not based on whether the stop motion animation is “good” or not.

It just “is”. It’s more the story I’m concerned with. As in, I love Coraline or Nightmare Before Christmas, but that’s not because it’s stop motion animation, anymore that I love certain Pixar flicks just for being digitally animated.

The medium versus the message. Phil Tippet’s deep love of stop motion animation I guess is meant to be the one and only attraction here, because it’s definitely not the dialogue. Just to be clear, there’s no fucking dialogue.

Not a word. There is only two things maybe that give an inkling as to what (maybe?) the story is kind-of about. It starts with an image I’m pretty sure is the Tower of Babel being destroyed, or at least covered in dark smoke clouds, and then a quote from Leviticus saying someone pissed off Old Testament God, so he was going to destroy them and everyone in their tribe.

And then a whole bunch of other things happen. I think they follow some kind of concept or whatever, as if it’s a series of film clips from someone’s concept album – some horrid prog rock band from the 80s or 90s, something with a portentous and pretentious name like Good Apollo, I'm Burning Star IV, Volume One: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.

Truth be told, that’s a real album name from a real band called Coheed and Cambria. And the reason I know is because am the proud owner of said album.

The thing is, even they wouldn’t have wanted this film playing over their songs. Of course, there used to be lots of film clips that had exactly this kind of stop motion animation. But when you were tired / bored / blitzed at 2am on a Friday and these were playing on Rage or MTV, you could watch them in awe or with mild interest, and they went for five minutes or so. If it was good you enjoyed it, if it was dull it was over in 5 minutes, so you didn’t mind too much.

This plays either like one film clip stretched out to obscene length and girth, or like 16 similar film clips shown one after the other, daring you to switch the screen off and go to bed or get more drugs or something other than continue watching.

I would not recommend watching this stoned. I don’t smoke: I have no idea what this would be like stoned, but it did not feel like it would be enjoyable or sane to watch this stoned. It is beyond grotesque, though not completely horrifying. The imagery, to me, was quite often more gross than terrifying.

The film pretty much starts with a guy in a mask and a trench coat being lowered on a cable from some higher place into the depths of some other place. He descends down many levels. One of those levels has dinosaur bones so you know that level is at least 6000 years old (creationist joke right there, and for free!).

But he goes lower through gunfire, the ruins of other civilisations, lower, and then tries to get to some place based on a crumbling map. Along the way all sorts of horrifying things seem to happen to everything and everyone else other than the main guy. Beings are created and destroyed casually, accidentally, and sometimes with malice. But the main guy just rolls on until he doesn’t anymore.

He drops off a suitcase on top of a pile of suit cases, then is captured, disembowelled, his head is drilled into, and a baby worm like thing is extracted as well, that goes onto to be used in the creation of a galaxy or something, where the cycle of birth and destruction continues unabated(?)

And after the head drilling thing, we see footage of a person, like a human person, ruling some kind of place where people like the first guy are lowered down on the cable to drop these suitcases off.

I recognise that guy, that human. It’s director Alex Cox, director of such legendary films as Sid & Nancy and Repo Man, and, less famously for drek like Perdita Durango.

I don’t know why he’s here. I don’t know why he’s the Last Man. I don’t know why he puts on a yarmulke at one point. I don’t know what this flick is saying about cruelty or creation or life or the world or about this dark, brutal fantasy world which possibly mirrors our own. It’s impossible for me to see an artistic representation of the slaughter of countless thousands of beings, even if they’re faceless and somewhat amorphous (though human shaped in appearance) and not think that it’s saying something about the Holocaust specifically or genocides in general.

But as to what it might be saying, I have no idea. I think maybe the guys with the suitcases are trying to end the cycle, but I’m not sure. I don’t mind not knowing, but I can’t see myself watching this flick again in order to figure it out for myself.

What I have a harder time fathoming is that this guy has been making this flick since the 1980s, and only finished it recently thanks to the thousand or so people who contributed to a Kickstarter campaign. Like, did you get to say what you really wanted to say?

Is this it? You poured decades of your life, all your time and money and effort, and it was for this? I sat through the entirety of the credits, and virtually every heading and section had underneath it, amongst many other names, the name Phil Tippet.

And I sat through the entirety of the flick as well, willingly, there was no gun to my head, and I’m sure every single scene has a bit of Phil Tippet in it.

I’m glad that you got to finish your dark dream project. I just wish it was for something more enjoyable, entertaining or illuminating.

Mad God is an unholy nightmare, but not as fun or as diverting as those words would imply.

5 times this flick felt way longer that its 82 minutes out of 10

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“I will make the land desolate so that your enemies who settle it shall be appalled by it. And you I will scatter among the nations and I will unsheath the sword against you. Your land shall become a desolation and your cities a ruin.” – Leviticus 26:32 – the words of a truly sharing, caring god - Mad God