You know the work of Phil Tippett, even if you have never heard his name. Arguably he is the greatest pioneer of modern stop-motion effects and puppetry since Ray Harryhausen. His clever fingers and inventive mind have been integrally involved in everything from the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, to the chess table in Star Wars. For the last thirty years, between working on Hollywood spectaculars, he has been creating his own dark opus, Mad God.
It’s difficult to describe the strange and uncanny horror that makes up this old-school technique special effect extravaganza. It opens with a strange figure, in gas mask and helmet, being lowered into the bowels of a ruined Earth. Deep within, he trudges through a landscape filled with crude machines, obscenely grotesque figures and death on every corner. This strange world is a ruin of maddening incongruity, filled with endless rust, refuse and faeces. Only the story, such as it is, has far more to show than just one visitor’s trip, and flits dreamlike through multiple vignettes of ever increasingly savage misanthropy.
It’s difficult to parse a film like Mad God. Tippett’s masterwork is essentially an 80-minute art installation, with no dialogue or plot as such. It’s more dream-logic than sense, and filled to brimming with every twisted creation to have been vomited from his mind. It’s laudable in terms of artistry for the sheer scope and scale of it. The mixture of stop-motion, model-work, live-action and puppetry is probably the most complex and ambitious ever seen. Great sweeping vistas of post-apocalyptic cities or barbed-wire-strewn trenches seem to stretch forever. Giant buildings soar to the gloomy reaches above, and pits seem to drop to an endless nothing. The entire design of the world and its inhabitants is an uncanny fusion of Hieronymus Bosch, Dix, and Beksiński, all suffused in dirt, dust and shit.
The rare semblances of recognizable humanity come in the form of Alex Cox as “The Last Man”, and Nikita Roman as a nurse in a nightmarish hospital. But like every other denizen of this horror show, their actions are as inscrutable as they are bizarre. Cox at least seems to be having fun, donning a motley of religious garb, and sending off the doomed explorers to the depths. But this is not a film with a plot, it’s the surreal avant-garde experiment of a master craftsman, playing with form and digging into the darkest parts of his mind to make something broken and odd, but strangely beautiful.
Screening as part of the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2021