Every so often, a movie comes along that kicks you in the ass to remind you that the old masters are still the most powerful creative forces in film. One such movie was last May’s Top Gun: Maverick, which featured practical filmmaking, a big heart, and universally agreeable themes. On the flip side of that is another movie with practical effects and unbridled creativity: Phil Tippett’s Mad God. The special effects guru behind the original Star Wars movies, Jurassic Park, and Robocop has been making this movie in his spare time over the course of 30 years, and the result is an uncommonly violent stop motion nightmare that inhabits its director’s fractured psyche to a mind-bending degree.

With CGI being the dominant special effects technique of today, Mad God’s stop-motion puppetry hypnotizes in ways that the biggest CGI studios in the industry cannot ever hope to achieve. The myriad of mangled creatures move with unsettling cadence in a nightmarish landscape littered with wires, skulls, shit, and twisted metal. The grotesqueness and bleakness of these designs go hand in hand with the jerky stop motion animation to create an experience that is so captivating in its eeriness that you have to wonder why there aren’t more atmospherically dark stop motion films like this.

And good lord is Mad God dark. You really have to wonder if Phil Tippett is okay once you witness the unrelenting joylessness of the whole experience. Not one of the inhabitants of the Mad God world has it easy, and in place of a conventional narrative, much of the movie’s runtime is essentially a montage of various stop motion creatures being tortured, crushed, dismembered, and vivisected. Armies of mindless slaves, their lives so pitifully meaningless, shamble about in a hellish industrial apocalypse that spews smoke and flame, with most of them getting pulverized by the machinery or committing suicide via incineration. In the distance, the inhabitants of an apartment block are seen laughing maniacally while stabbing each other. There’s also a curious abundance of moments where different little creatures get squashed when the movie’s main character (I use this term very loosely) unknowingly steps on them. The total lack of spoken dialogue also contributes to the brutality; there’s no explanation for why this world exists or why everyone is so cruel to each other, and the lack of any expository scenes means you spend the entirety of Mad God absorbing its disturbing imagery and a soundscape filled with screams, moans, squelching and baby babbling (?!). Definitely not a movie experience for the faint of heart.

Mad God was made without a conventional script or overarching vision, and it definitely shows in it’s latter half which, ironically, tries to be more narratively driven. While the first half uses a very simple story of a saboteur on a mission to blow up the Mad God city as a vehicle through which the movie depicts its horrific world, the second half gradually steers things into serious WTF territory as the plot becomes more complex and disjointed, fracturing into several head-scratching sequences before culminating in a finale that, frankly, I have trouble describing to others.

It’s best to think of Mad God as a collection of short stories glued together at the hip that, as the title suggests, showcases a world that has been manipulated into unending evil by, well, a mad god. It’s as if this god somehow extracted the essence of every atrocity humans have inflicted on themselves and mother nature throughout history, and then infused that essence into this world and its fantastical inhabitants. This is arguably one of the bleakest works of science fiction horror ever put to film, and its darkness is only matched by its technical achievements. So exhausting was the work put into this movie that it sent Phil Tippett to the psych ward about a year before its release. It’s rare to find movies with this much craft and complexity, so if you’re feeling brave enough to stomach Mad God, please go for it, because we won’t be seeing anything like it again for the foreseeable future.