Mad God

 You may not know Phil Tippet's name, but you know his work. He's one of the main driving forces behind the dinosaur effects in the Jurassic Parks, the AT-ATs and Tauntauns in Empire Strikes Back, and more importantly (to me!) the ED-209 in Robocop. The way it gingerly tests the stairs before tumbling down... oh you sweet, leopard-voiced brute.
 Anyhow: the guy's an absolute indisputable 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, did a kickstart fund injection in 2012, and finally released on Shudder a few days ago.

 Mad God is a surrealist, gruelling walk through many, many hellish locations, using varied types of animation and visual FX (puppetry, stop motion, the type of mixed chemical footage that made the visuals in The Fountain so memorable) plus a little live action here and there to basically pour cool-looking creepy shit down your eyeballs for every single scene of its duration.

 After a particularly unhinged bible quote (Leviticus, of course*) and some 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 huge number of insanely detailed and varied scenes. He wanders among monsters and bystanders (who have a pretty funny tendency to bite it in elaborate and horrifying ways), usually trying to sneak by or run away from some menace.

 The film has a nasty, hypnotising momentum while it accompanies the man, and then others like him, in scenic walks through horrible places. And that's what most of the movie is, really; Very episodic, as you'd guess from its patchwork production. There are a couple of interludes but most of the running time is taken up by this extremely bleak, ridiculously well crafted travelogue.

 There's precious little dialogue, and as with most surrealist movies, not a huge amount of plot; It's more a succession of thematically coherent vignettes than a 'proper' narrative. Not to say there isn't a story there. You might be able to mine some sense from it, since the film is full of mythic resonances and it pulls out far enough to show enough pieces you could use to put together a reasonable semblance of an explanation. Even then, your interpretation will probably look very different from someone else's (mine, for the record, involves Gnosticism.)

 And to be honest, the lack of a more conventional plot didn't bother me much. It'd make me happy just to know that this movie exists, never mind that it's a great on its own terms.

* 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 curse that mentions eating your children; The ancient world was pretty brutal.
 Leviticus is usually known as the bible book most Christian homophobes use to justify their bullshit, and the one a lot of atheists turn to when looking for stuff to make fun of. I'm as atheist as they come but I still cringe when I read things I wrote two decades ago... so I can understand that some people wrote some silly stuff two millennia ago. Doesn't excuse the hateful stuff though.