There’s something to be said about good stop-motion special effects. The gold standard is generally considered to be Ray Harryhausen, but for living masters of the art, there’s Phil Tippett. Tippett worked on various movies from my childhood such as various Star Wars and Robocop films. But when Tippett saw what computers could do in Jurassic Park, he knew his own form of special effects were probably on their way out. However, he did have an idea of his own, thirty years in the making, finally finished with help from some volunteers and a Kickstarter compaign.
The result is Mad God, and it just hit Shudder.
The movie opens with a shadow falling over a tower, and then the only coherent words in the entire movie as a few Bible verses scroll across the screen. Said verses come from Leviticus, so you should have a rough idea about the tenor of said verses if you know anything about Leviticus. From there, the movie starts with a diving bell being lowered past a wide range of strange sights. When it finally hits the ground level, out steps the Assassin. A stop-motion character, he wears a gas mask and wouldn’t look too out of place in the trenches of World War I. His map flakes apart into smaller pieces every time he takes it out, and he has to go…somewhere. Nothing is really explained in this movie so much as implied.
However, as the Assassin makes his way across a really hellish landscape, and that’s hellish in a Hieronymus Bosch sort of way with a dash of the aforementioned first World War, all that may not matter as the sights all around him. This is more of a movie of visual delights, and while it does tell a story of sorts, it really is more about the visuals. The world Tippett created is one that seems to run on excrement (no exaggeration) and cruelty. Pretty much everything the Assassin sees or encounters over the course of his journey looks like it’s covered in something that at best looks like mud and probably isn’t.
Now, there are some actual human beings in the movie, but they don’t speak anything that might be considered an actual language. If there are any human dialects, my tinnitus couldn’t exactly pick it out, and most of the sounds I heard seemed to be more along the lines of babies crying or the occasional monkey. The humans, the ones I saw, are listed in the closing credits as the Last Man, the Surgeon, and the Nurse, and about all I can say about any of them is the Nurse had what I considered some nice eyes, the rest of her face covered by a surgical mask.
So, was the movie worth it? If you want a narrative, not really. If you want to see some amazing stop-action work with some amazingly creative creatures, a dark sense of humor, and the net result of nearly thirty years of work, then yeah, this is pretty damn awesome. If Tippett has it in him, at his age and all, to do more like this, it would definitely be worth a look. And while I wouldn’t call this scary or anything, it was on Shudder, so it isn’t something I would plop the kids in front of. Instead, check it out about 90 minutes of grotesque beauty.
Grade: B+
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