DO NOT GO GENTLY: Phil Tippett's stop-motion masterpiece MAD GOD (2021, wri/dir Phil Tippett, 83mns, Shudder, USA)

Some movies try to say it all. And some drive their makers mad.

Stop-motion animation master Phil Tippett, responsible for key stop-motion sequences in classics like THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, INDIANA JONES & THE TEMPLE OF DOOM, ROBOCOP spent thirty years to bring his dialogue-less nightmare vision MAD GOD to completion.

CHICKEN RUN this ain't. 

He finally did in 2021 but had a total breakdown about a year before, checking himself into a psychiatric ward, and needing months to fully come out of his trauma.

As Tippett himself points out in interviews, this kind of breakdown in the obsessive heat of completion of an ambitious artistic work has happened to Francis Ford Coppola (APOCALYPSE NOW), Vincent Van Gogh, even famed psychologist Carl Jung.

And in some ways, it is Jung's mytho-poetic and dream psychology understanding of the universe, human consciousness, and the mono-myth at the heart of most religions that infuses nearly every scene of MAD GOD.

If the eyes are the windows into the human soul, Tippett plays with this by often keeping the eyes of his characters from us yet populating his nightmarish world with disconnected eyes…

The plot of MAD GOD, such as it is, follows an "Assassin" into a labyrinthine netherworld of horrific industrial dreamscapes, mutant monsters, war, and destruction. But when the Assassin is on the verge of completing the mission, something even more horrific happens which implies a never ending cycle of death-rebirth-creation-destruction.

MAD GOD is a brilliant and unbelievable film. Tippett and his team go for pure cinema here. There is little if any dialogue. This writer never noticed its absence. The storytelling is that precise and clear. 

The sound design by Apocalypse Now's 83 year old master Richard Begg's is critical to the hellish world building. Brilliant atmospheric sound design has always been a near MUST for a movie to move to greatness. 

This is 2001 level cinema for anguishing adults. While the movie is hallucinatory, like you're descending with Dante and Virgil into Tippett's own psyche/inferno, it communicates with the clarity of an undisturbed pool of water. We see slave-like mindless humans without features indiscriminately destroyed by hellish large scale industry. We constantly see everything thrives on death and killing. The "Assassin" squashes under boot what appear to be two miniscule Santa Claus like elves early on in the movie without even realizing he did this. Later, a deformed alchemist troll giddily feeds worms to two salamander like creatures in an aquarium type container then lets loose a spider to devour the child salamander who has just devoured the worm.

The doctor will see you now. . .but you won’t want to see the doctor.

It's hard to argue with or look away from the logic we all try to avoid when we eat our latest cheeseburger or chicken bucket. 

But the movie is even darker and more mysterious than these scattered examples. A mid-movie extended surgical sequence requires some concentrated focus to realize how it weaves together with the bigger narrative. And its implications (if this writer understood them) are at once terrible and terrific. 

The stop motion in the movie is woven seamlessly with a few scenes of real life actors (including REPO MAN director Alex Cox!!) and other special effects sleight of hand. The overall effect, even for a cinephile, is to make you wonder which shots were which. It doesn't distract from the movie (at least for this writer). If anything, it's an incredible inspiration and epiphany to see a special effects genius with a relatively small budget of $150K use every tool in the toolbox to get the movie made.

It's a lesson well worth learning. It's a master class. 

While it's hard to argue that MAD GOD has an uplifting message, there is an argument to be made that it has a profound spiritual one. Not a message that spells things out. Again, there is no dialogue though a biblical quote from Leviticus does open the movie. And if the movie has a spiritual undergirding its pantheistic not Christian. But the spiritual message is one of cycles of birth, death, rebirth (another common element of the mono myth). There may even be something about the ultimate immutablity of the soul. 

Stop-motion master Phil Tippet hard at work.

But look, we'll leave it to you. MAD GOD is a movie to be experienced. It's one of an ever rarer breed of movie that dares to go beyond the limits of language to explore the really big themes we've never reconciled.

MAD GOD absolutely deserves to be put in the same conversation as 2001, SOLARIS, ORDET, AU HAZARD BALTHAZAR, PERSONA, THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, ERASERHEAD, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN.

Movies that go where we dare not go but will have to, whether we want to or not, when we are pushed across that mysterious border of death from whence no traveller returns.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.