The movie opens with some dark passages from Leviticus, notably warning that disobedience will be punished by 'eating the flesh of your sons and daughters.' When the scrawl ends, a cylinder descends from the sky. Ground forces blast away but it soon drops below them, passing into some dark caverns for what seems an eternity. There are ruins, forgotten statues, and horribly mutated beasts. At last, the craft lands amid more ruins and a single figure in armor and gasmask emerges. As he consults a map, the craft is hoisted back upward; ah, it is a bathysphere. I had thought there was an unseen parachute above it. While the figure follows the map ever deeper into the apocalyptic hellscape, there are endless scenes of cruelty and horror, most of it covered in feces. So much feces.
The disgust factor is high. There are giants emptying their bowels while suffering eternally upon electric chairs, humanoids stamped from the feces into a slave workforce, a vivisection in which blood splatters the walls and the 'doctor' yanks organs from a chest cavity while the victim somehow remains alive through the torture, the long stretches of a baby crying plaintively. Horrendous beasts that inflict pain and suffering for no particular reason, often spewing feces in the process. There are giant monkey-like creatures whose sole purpose is to shovel an endless flow of feces into piles; when they don't a cruel gnome electrocutes them into submission and the resumption of the task.
There is no dialogue. Most of the action is stop-motion. There are a handful of scenes that involves actors, but they do not speak. The story is difficult to follow. This is the tale of God punishing man for his disobedience.
Hard pass! Avoid this movie. If you want to see some far superior stop-motion, checkout any of the Aardman's movies (e.g., Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, Flushed Away, Shaun the Sheep, etc.). After seeing this travesty of a movie, I was in a sour mood for hours afterwards. Huge downer with no redeeming quality.
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