'Mad God' (2021)


It's that time again where Youtube throws me a 'Shudder' advert and I think to myself, 'I'm paying five quid a month for this, I really should watch something, lets give it a go...' This time round, 'It' was the film 'Mad God' and the trailer was this mad batshit crazy shot of stop-motion horror that was over before I'd had a chance to get my head round it; leaving me pretty unsettled but with no clear idea just why that was... That's all I need sometimes, I was in... It's almost an hour later and, damn, that was grim, bleak and... What the hell just happened?

A corroded diving bell descends amidst a ruined city and the Assassin emerges from it to explore a labyrinth of bizarre landscapes inhabited by freakish denizens.

That is about all I can tell you about 'Mad God' and that's only because I had a quick look on IMDB and that was all IMDB could tell me... 'Mad God' is any number of things but it's not what you'd call coherent in terms of plot. The Assassin has a mission but we have no idea why or anything like that, he (okay, that's a big assumption but I'm sticking with it for now) just walks through a literal hell on earth until, well... that would be telling...

And if 'Mad God' has anything even closely resembling a point, I think that's it. The journey made by the Assassin is the ideal excuse for Phil Tippett to show off just how good he is with the ol' 'stop-motion magic'. I'll admit to knowing next to nothing about Tippett, and stop-motion in general, but just one viewing of 'Mad God' is enough for anyone to see that Tippett not only has the vision but he also has the technical ability to pull it off. The end result is a constant visual onslaught of deeply unsettling things carried out by particularly grotesque monsters while expendable drone people are killed off (I'm pretty sure there's a message there but I was too immersed in the sheer bleakness of this setting to really have any time to consider it.) Honestly, it was so unrelenting grim that I had to keep taking little breaks away from the screen, I couldn't help but keep watching though, just because it is so well done with loads of little details that you don't want to miss, even if they make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up...

'Mad God' is one of those films that I'll never watch again (because it's that good at what it does) but where I'm really glad that I gave it a go (because, you guessed it, it's that good at what it does). You can find 'Mad God' on Shudder.

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