Mad God

 You may not know Phil Tippet's name, but you know his work. He's one of the main driving force behind the dinosaur effects in the Jurassic Parks, the AT-ATs and Tauntauns in Empire Strikes Back, and more importantly (to me!) the animation for the ED-209 in Robocop. Dat death rattle.
 Anyhow, the guy's an absolute legend. And for the last thirty years or so he's been working on and off on his own weird dream project, a mostly stop-motion trek through hell, which he started in 1990, kickstart-funded in 2012, and fully released a few days back on Shudder.

 Mad God is a surrealist walk through many, many different types of hells, using several different types of animation (puppetry, stop motion, the type of mixed liquid shots that made The Fountain so memorable) and a little live action here or there to basically throw cool-looking creepy shit at your eyes for its duration. Cool creepy shit: The motion picture would be a pretty accurate name for this.

Metal as fuuuuuuuck!

 After a particularly unhinged bible quote (courtesy, of course, of Leviticus*) and some staggeringly awesome tower-of-babel-like scene setting, a gas-masked dude is lowered into an apocalyptic wasteland via a rickety diving bell. Once he gets off he starts legging it through a ridiculous number of insanely detailed and varied tableaus.
 He wanders among monsters and bystanders (who have a pretty funny tendency to bite it in elaborate and horrifying ways) in these incredible locations, having many adventures (mostly of the sneak-by or run-away-from-some-menace variety.)

 The film has an incredible, hypnotizing momentum while it accompanies this man, and then others like him in their scenic walk through horrible places. And that's what most of the movie is, really. There are a couple of interludes, one of which is not a lot of fun and unfortunately stops the movie dead for way too long, but most of the running time is taken by this extremely cinematic, ridiculously well crafted travelogue.

 There's just one line of (minimalist) dialogue, and like in most surrealist movies, there's not a lot of story - it's more thematically coherent than a 'proper' narrative. You might be able to mine some sense from it, since the film has enough mythic resonance and pulls out far enough a few times to show enough pieces you could put together into a semblance of an explanation, but your interpretation will probably look very different from mine (which, for the record, involves Gnosticism... because of course it does.)
 But that's all part of the charm in this sort of thing. I'm so glad it was made.

* (I like that passage, it's a good bit of old testament don't-fuck-with-me swagger. Somewhat shockingly, it's not the only bible quote that mentions munching on your children... guessing that was a thing with infant mortality rates and hunger back then? Leviticus is also known as that book most Christian homophobes use to justify their bullshit, and a lot of atheists use to point out all the ridiculous crap that's in the Bible)