‘Mad God’ is a hybrid stop-motion live action sci-fi horror film. It follows the Assassin as he descends into a ruined city in a diving bell, exploring the labyrinth of mystifying and grotesque creatures.
The film opens on the masked Assassin as he makes his way down into a bizarre wasteland. With a briefcase bomb in one hand an a slowly deteriorating map in the other, he pushes forward through one horrifying landscape after another, inhabited by faceless drones, torture victims and other monstrosities.
Continuing through the ruins, the Assassin reaches a mountain of suitcases like his. He sets the bomb to detonate and waits for it to go off. Unaware of a mutant monster nearby, the Assassin is pulled away from the bomb, that fails to go off.
The Assassin is then stripped of his armour and tortured before an audience, and later shackled to a table where he is left to suffer. Later, the Surgeon and the Nurse operate on him, ripping open his rib cage and rummaging around in his chest cavity. They remove his organs, coins and jewels, useful secrets of war and books. The Surgeon then finds a screaming child within that he hands to the Nurse. She proceeds to bring the child to a floating creature.
At the same time, another Assassin descends into the underworld, he travels through the wasteland on a motorcycle, and then a jeep, until he reaches and descends a spiral roadway. The floating creature brings the child to an alchemist who liquefies the child, smelts it down to a metal and then grinds the metal to a fine glittering powder. The floating creature scatters the powder into a portal, where a new universe is born. The universe goes through stages of evolution, ultimately decaying into another wasteland.
‘Mad God’ is unique, - in its presentation, unapologetic tone and simple narrative. The film must be praised for the seemingly insurmountable task and effort that has gone into producing such a vibrant, albeit for the most part grotesque, world.
The initial descent into the bowels of the underworld that we see as we follow the first Assassin on his way down and through a variety of nightmare-inducing hellscapes is breathtaking. At first. With each new set, the film digs its claws deeper into the viewers mind and relentlessly pummels us with increasingly disgusting an torturous scenes, culminating only after the Assassin expires after the child is torn from his insides. The film becomes almost physically difficult to sit through as the visual and sound effects combine to form what can be essentially described as going beyond ‘torture porn’ as we are exposed to progressively nauseating and violent scenes.
Up until the midpoint, the colour scheme of the film consists of mostly drab and dark tones, where it makes a hard left turn and introduces us to a bright and colourful world of seemingly cheery little creatures. The rug is pulled out from under us though, as the Alchemist only uses the little ones to feed a monstrosity he’s hidden elsewhere, reminding us that this world can in no way be happy or cheerful.
‘Mad God’ can be viewed to address the reality of war, where no one is safe, and everyone functions in subservience to another, making monsters out of all of them. The Assassin's trek through the bowels of the wasteland only serves that point, as the deeper he goes into the heart of the nightmarish ruins, the worse it gets. By showing us the multitude of suitcases before him and by following the second Assassin, ‘Mad God’ seems to note that there is no quick-fix to a system built and functioning around war, where a single bomb could save it all. Moreover, the creation and deterioration of the new universe only solidifies the sentiment that we are unable to overcome ourselves and will inevitably resort to a life of pain and misery through warfare.
‘Mad God’ is an outrageous exercise in proving that stop-motion is a timeless craft, as it provides to be one of the most uncomfortable yet fascinating explorations of a run-down apocalypse, pulling the viewer in and not letting go until its done with you. The film may not be for everyone, but it feels like an instant cult classic,- gruesome and repugnant, yet alluring enough to keep the viewers enticed right til the end.
Score: 4/4
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