Holy Shitting Giants! Mere words are not sufficient to describe this film. Mad God is one of those transcendent experiences that are hard to capture and explain to people. Hence this is not a review - I have no idea how to review such a singular, eccentric, weird, disgusting, beautiful work of art.
A touchstone comparison could be if Jodorowsky made a 90 minute music video for Tool in 1993, but it’s also not like that at all because this is 110% Phil Tippet, unfiltered and unbridled, freed from Star Wars & the constraints of Hollywood entirely.
The opening 30 minute section of this film is the greatest thing I’ve seen in a long time, the very definition of a ‘trip’. We are taken down, down, down into a subterranean post-apocalyptic hellscape where among the horrors on display are giant figures that shit into a huge gaping mouth that feeds bulbous bladders covered in eyeballs, while freshly birthed slave figures are worked literally to death in a huge senseless factory of the macabre, but the metaphor is clear.
Mad God is a beautifully handcrafted psychotropic fever dream that I will revisit many times (I’ve watched it twice so far). Every second of the 30 years that maestro Tippet spent on this film was well spent and god bless @shudder for making it available for us to witness.
I know this sounds a bit hyperbolic, but it’s true. I was disturbed and elevated by this film - a masterwork by the Mad God himself, rancor-trainer, bug-wrangler Phil Tippet. Bow down to the greatest Phil to ever do it (sorry Collins).