Hellboy - The Crooked Man

A Witch Before Dying

Hellboy - The Crooked Man
Directed by Brian Taylor
USA/UK/Germany/Bulgaria 2024
Dark Horse Comics/Icon
UK Cinema Release Print.

Warning: Very slight content spoilers for two scenes.

This must be one of the least publicised movies out there and I’ve no idea why, now I’ve seen it, because it’s great. I told a few of my friends who are Hellboy fans that I was going to see the new one, Hellboy - The Crooked Man and, some of them didn’t even know a fourth film in the franchise had been made. I know this is like a low budget, poor cousin to the other three but, really? They didn’t have a proper advertising budget?

Anyhooo!. Okay, so let me be straight about this… I love Guillermo del Toro as a director and think he makes some great movies. And I liked his Hellboy movies, especially the second one but, I have to say I preferred Neil Marshall’s stab at the character in the third film and, I think this new one runs that one a close second too. One of my favourite reviewers commented on Twitter that this film is the closest of them all to a an almost verbatim adaptation of the comic book run it’s based on and, although I’ve never read any of them (as yet), I can see how that might be the case. Especially since, for once, we have the original comic creator Mike Mignola writing the screenplay for his character here.

Okay… brief rundown of the plot. It’s the late 1950s (so I guess that makes this one a prequel) and Hellboy (played here by Jack Kesey) is on a freight train in the deep countryside with special agent Bobbie Jo Song (played wonderfully by Adeline Rudolph) and another agent. They are baby sitting their cargo to get back to their headquarters… said cargo being an imprisoned spider housing a demonic soul inside it. Well, as they go through a specific, witchy part of the country, the spider grows to giant size, gets loose, kills an agent and escapes, crashing the train carriage (but not the rest of the train somehow… I think the low budget has something to do with this because we don’t see the carriage again) and allowing it to escape. Hellboy and Bobby start exploring the area and come across someone suffering from a witch’s curse and also they bump into a guy called Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a basically good guy with a lucky bone and who is trying hard not to be the witch he somehow has become. All three of them head off to find his friend and then find the dark forces unleashed in the surrounding forest, so the two agents can try and locate their hellish cargo. And that’s as much as I’m saying about that.

So if you’re familiar with the Hellboy franchise then, maybe just leave your expectations at the door for this one. Although ‘Big Red’ has the similar, cynical and humorous attitude to the world (although he seems less world weary and specialised, which makes sense if it's set in the 50s), the script really strips the comedy element down to pretty much nothing here. Instead, what we have is a straight up, in your face, relatively small scale horror movie which should surely please fans of the genre. It’s not exactly scary… it’s still a horror action movie with the emphasis on the darker elements of the plot… but it is suspenseful and, I have to say, budgetary constraints aside, a really well made movie. Which is what I’d expect from someone who directed the brilliant Crank pictures and the second, superior Ghost Rider movie.

Even the opening and closing title card is absolutely designed to get under your skin. Perhaps taking a cue from the early Insidious movies, it’s an uncompromising card which enters suddenly and then just leaves, dropping you into the middle of the action. While this movie is set in the fifties, it could almost be set anytime because the whole of the film is pretty much confined to the forest, the nearby landscape and its inhabitants... whether human, demonic and, in one scene where a church is under siege, the freshly risen undead.

Now, the film is not as gory as the glorious third film in the franchise (reviewed here) but it does have its moments and there’s a nice sequence where Tom goes to find a witch friend and, when they get there, she’s just a naked skin on the bed, uninhabited. Very much looking like a prop from the wonderful 1966 British horror movie Island Of Terror (reviewed here). And then, when the witch returns in the form of an animal (I can’t remember which, maybe a racoon), the animal enters the skin through the mouth and suddenly the body begins filling back up with bone and internal organs as it spasms on the bed. So not so much gory but satisfyingly gloopy in certain scenes, for sure.

The film is fast paced and is entertaining as hell. And it’s got a nice complimentary score by someone called Sven Falconer which I’m guessing we’re not going to see on CD anytime soon, more’s the pity. It works really well for the small scale nature of the majority of the film though and it helps keep this frenetic pacing making sense when, in later scenes, the editor keeps crosscutting between three to four protagonists as each encounter their own problems.

And I think that’s me done with this one. I really had an unexpectedly good time with Hellboy - The Crooked Man and if you’re a fan of the franchise or, especially, horror movies in general, then this one is definitely worth seeing on a big screen, I would say. Loved it.