Mad God review: What in hell did I just watch?

This is one of the most gobsmacking, mind-bending, stomach-churning movies I have seen. It’s an indefinable personal masterpiece.

Mad God: Picture: This is one of the most mind-bending (and perhaps stomach-churning) movies you will see

Phil Tippett’s Mad God is one of the most gobsmacking films I have seen. It’s an indefinable personal masterpiece by the American visual effects legend (Oscars for Return of the Jedi and Jurassic Park) that blends stop motion animation, puppetry and live action.

It’s a bleak, visceral, nightmarish vision of worlds past, present, future and imagined. It’s not for the squeamish, yet it’s also funny. My teen son and I laughed as we surrendered to the weird beauty of all this chaos coming out of one man’s head.

There is no narrative, no dialogue, beyond the grunts of a possibly mad scientist and the screaming of a baby that sounds human but looks otherwise, and while there is a plot of sorts, it defeats explanation.

There’s a helmeted, gas-masked man who looks like a British soldier from World War I. He descends into a hellscape, hard suitcase in hand. We learn that inside the suitcase is a time bomb.

He moves through tiers of this desolated, dystopian place amid grotesque angry beasts and quivering, slavish, hairy humanoid workers who are regularly, randomly maimed and pulverised.

From the credits, but not from the 85-minute film itself, I learned that this unnamed man is The Assassin and the maimed and pulverised are the Shit Men.

All of this is achieved though superb stop motion animation. I have since read that Tippett used his cat’s hair, extracted from his vacuum cleaner, to turn 15cm-tall foam rubber models into the hirsute Shit Men.

So on one level this is a movie for special effects diehards. They will see the animated models and think of the original Star Wars and the holographic chess game between Chewbacca and C-3PO, which Tippett created.

As such, this movie, which 70-year-old Tippett has been working on for 30 years, is a love letter to his speciality, one that has been overshadowed by computer-generated imagery.

When Steven Spielberg asked him to work on the original Jurassic Park (1993), Tippett was disappointed that the director ending up choosing CGI over dinosaur models.

He was hired, after all, on the strength of the model dragon in Dragonslayer (1981), for which he was Oscar nominated. He joked that his preferred line of work was becoming extinct. But he stayed on and won his second visual effects Oscar.

As I watched Mad God I was returned to my boyhood and the landmark stop motion animation of Ray Harryhausen in movies such as The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). I think Tippett nods to his predecessor here via a cyclops. I’m sure there are lots of other nods I missed.

In a statement on the film, Tippett, the producer, director, writer and of course special effects coordinator, says Mad God “kind of defies description”.

He suggests that what’s on the screen is secondary to “the memory of it after you watch it, like waking up and exploring a dream you just had”. The movie, he adds, is “just a way to get there’’.

I am fascinated by that thought. I think he’s right. My son and I have been talking about this movie ever since. Here are a few guesses as to what it’s about.

War definitely: from the trenches of WWI to the Hiroshima bomb and before and beyond. Credit here, and throughout, to cinematographer Chris Morley.

The Bible. I think it opens with the Tower of Babel. Capitalism and the Dickensian aspects of industrialisation. Human greed, callousness and waste.

The relentless ticking clock of time and how we seem never to learn its lessons. Hell, as Virgil put it in The Aeneid, which I suspect is a source, that is easy to get in to, hard to get out of.

There’s a rapid flip-card like sequence towards the end that offers some tantalising clues.

We watched it a dozen times, using the pause and rewind buttons. We picked up a few obvious references such as Dante’s Inferno and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam.

Yet we still retired for the night with “what-the-hell?” running through our heads.

The movie opens with a quote from the Book of Leviticus — the “and your land shall be a desolation” sort of stuff — so we know we are dealing with a merciless god. There is an Edenic moment (perfect music by Dan Wool) that, well, we all know what happened there.

Who/what is this God? Perhaps it’s (and all of this is acted live action) the grunting scientist, the long-fingernailed alchemist, the surgeon who tears the screaming thing from a man’s stomach, or the Last Man (a great cameo by writer-director Alex Cox)?

Or, back to special effects, is it the seated giants excreting into the mouths of those below them (needed the pause button for that one), the cleaver-swinging beast pictured with this review, or someone/something else?

I do not know. What I do know is that this is one of the most mind-bending (and perhaps stomach-churning) movies you will see. Will you like it? That, too, I do not know.

Romei’s verdict: 4.5 stars