The steampunky explorer, sporting a gas mask and bowler hat, descends, descends, descends in a diving bell of sorts through a tiered wasteland, its increasingly despairing levels representing either circles of hell or remnants of civilizations past. The figure watches, with indifference, as vicious monsters tear each other apart and cruel overseers abuse their charges, depending what terrorized terrain the explorer passes. Most activities are at once mechanical and monstrously biological, as when gears grind a creature into a goo that is then funneled into a giant’s gaping mouth. All in all, it’s as if Brazil and Delicatessen were train stops on a deranged Journey to the Center of the Earth. And the conductor was David Lynch.
In reality, this is Mad God, the long-gestating feature film directed by Phil Tippett, a special-effects legend known for character design and stop-motion effects in the likes of the original Star Wars trilogy, RoboCop, and Jurassic Park. Those all register as child’s play (yes, even RoboCop) next to Mad God, an exquisitely imagined excretion that is revelatory, revolting, and cruel.
Mostly a work of stop-motion, the movie boasts expansive, intricately detailed sets that the eye can’t help but want to explore, despite the horrors that take place among them. The first image is of a spiraled edifice standing before a giant, burning sun—likely an evocation of the biblical Tower of Babel. Indeed, the onscreen text that follows quotes Leviticus 6, where God promises gruesome punishment for any Israelites who dare to disobey. Among the threats? “You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.” (Something that likely is happening in some godforsaken corner of the screen.)
It’s true, the Bible can be a bitter read, especially if such passages aren’t given the context of grace that otherwise lines its pages. Imagining what the world might look like if a “mad god,” like the one heard in Leviticus, unleashed promised punishment, Tippett’s film bursts with creativity, but little beauty—much like the hideously fantastical religious paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. The closest element might be a delicately floating figure that trails flowing strips of fabric in its wake. (How did Tippett and his animators manage that with stop-motion?) Yet even this elegant being has a repugnant purpose: to carry a mewling worm baby, which has been forcibly plucked from the abdomen of that captured explorer, to a gnome-like man covered in pustules, who summarily squishes it. Spoiler apologies, I guess.
(9/9/2022)
