Mad God — Mad God(Blu Ray)

Mad God is a darkly surreal, at points highly deranged trip into a shifting and vast dystopian world. The film is a highbred of animation, stop monition, and live-action footage and really, it’s epic in its scope, imagination, and creative derangement. Here from Acorn Media is a Blu-ray release of the film- taking in commentary tracks and extras.

Mad God is a 2021 production- and it was written and directed by Berkeley, California-born Phil Tippett- and is very much a passion project, which has been worked on for the last thirty years or so. Tippet has one other feature-length director's credit to his name Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation (2004). He is most known as a two-time Academy Award-winning artist & animator- with his work dating back to the ’70s with Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977), moving onto Robocop (1987), Jurassic Park (1993), and many more.

The film runs at the one hour and twenty-three-minute mark, and really features little or no formal dialogue. It follows an unnamed gas-masked figure, who when we first see him is been lowered into a nighttime bomb-out landscape- with the figures pod being bombarded with artillery fire. At a point the pod stops, and out walks the figure- in their hands is a rapidly crumbling map- and from here the film unfolds as the travel makes its way through shifting and changing landscapes, trying to find the undefined point on the map.

The world is devilish detailed and bizarrely realized- as the traveller moves from broken down and industrial grimness. Through to fiery and gore-rolling landscapes full of figures carrying out futile tasks. Onto macabre 'n' surreal landscapes peopled by bent and stretched body figures, where faeces spurt into vast mouths to create more deranged creatures. There are cityscapes alive with shadows and depravity, ever-descending walkways, and battlefields roaring with barely hanging together tanks. 

 At a point we get introduced to more clearly human and live-action figures- at first, these are doctors and nurses pulling twitching, bent, and gore figures from badged people. And a little later there is the long-toe and hand-nailed Last Man- played by presenter/filmmaker Alex Cox, who will be known to Brits of a certain age as the presenter of the BBC film series Moviedrome. Aside from the odd chants, bizarre chatters, screams and bay. The film features a rather post-rock, at points wonky easy listening, dark soundscaping score

The whole thing does have a form of story/ quest running through it- though at points it does start to become a little confusing, but I guess that is the issue with this type of project. On the whole Mad God is certainly one hell of a trip into a truly vast and often demented/ deranged dystopia world- for the most part, my attention was held/ kept, though. On the whole, I feel it may have been better if the film had run at just the hour mark- because by this point I had become a little jaded by the whole grotesque and deranged flow of the picture, with no real characters to feel for/ identify with. Through I can certainly see myself revisiting the film again down the line, when in the mood to drop into deranged and dark craziness.
 

Moving onto this Blu-Ray release. And extras wise we get a nice selection of things first off we get two commentary tracks- one is with director Phil Tippett and Guillermo del Toro, and the other is with the cast and crew- I played the first of these. The pair start off talking about the origin of the film which dates back thirty years- we find out that there was a twelve-page tone script, and that influence wise he took in the work of Yung, Freud, and general art history. With key influences been Hieronymus Bosch and the cut-up work of Bob Dylan. We get talk about the first scene that was filmed for the picture & how the whole thing was built in chapters. We get discussion about how/ why many of the characters are imbued with dark and traumatic pain, and how the director sees it as above all an art piece. Later on, they talk about the shifts in the film's perspective, and how it still manages to maintain a flow. Tippett talks about an acid trip he took with his cat, and how this changed his outlook on life. The true handmade/non-digital feel to the film, and more. All in all, it’s a very laid-back and chatty track, with some worthy points and observations being made. Otherwise, we get the following- Interview with Mad God Writer/Director Phil Tippett (4.38), Mad God Influences & Inspirations (6.38), Maya Tippett's “The Making of Mad God”(10.19), Maya Tippett's “Worse Than the Demon”(12.33), Academy of Art University & Mad God (6.14), and behind the scenes montage (12.32).
 

Mad God truly is a one-off experience- and if you enjoy dark and surreal artiness you’ll certainly want to dive deep into the film's vast worlds. I just wish that had been a bit more formal narrative/ firmer story flow to the whole thing- but it certainly is an impressive creation.