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.

Hellboy (2019)

The Man Who Hell To Earth

Hellboy (2019)
2018 UK/USA
Directed by Neil Marshall
UK cinema release print.

You know, I thought a lot of the last two Hellboy movies, especially the second one so, frankly, the idea of doing a new, rebooted version of the character which didn’t involve the original dream team pairing of director Guillermo del Toro and actor Ron Perlman was pretty much anathema to me. I really wasn’t looking forward to this movie and even more so when I heard pretty much every critic weighing in with headlines saying it was one of the worst messes of a film out there. However, I thought I should witness the train wreck for myself and I had one slightly bright spark of a fact at my disposal which should have tipped me off that, maybe, this was worth a watch after all. That bright spark being director Neil Marshall, who made two of the best modern horror movies going... Dog Soldiers and The Descent.

I got lucky when I went and saw this because, honestly, this is an awesome film and I thoroughly enjoyed it... way more than I thought was possible. So I guess the bottom line from that is... don’t trust the professional critics, even if they all agree on something. This film is a great slice of exploitational horror which is not afraid to blend elements of epic, grandiose plotting with a true pulp/exploitation sensibility. In a way it felt a little like it had a kind of stylistic kinship with movies like Hansel And Gretel - Witch Hunters (reviewed by me here) and The Last Witch Hunter (reviewed here). Two movies which I think were less than enthusiastically received by audiences and which deserved more love.

As does this latest incarnation of Hellboy. I don’t think there were even ten people in the screening I went to and that’s a shame because it’s a solid and fun movie with some outstanding visual flourishes. There was even a jump scare moment which I didn’t see coming at one point.

Now, nobody can really fill the shoes of the mighty acting legend that is Ron Perlman in the role of Hellboy but David Harbour, who plays him here, actually does a really good job with the character and he manages to assuredly bypass the legacy of the role, giving us a nice interpretation of creator Mike Mignola’s comic book character. Both him and his ‘dad’, played by Ian McShane here (it was John Hurt in the last two movies), are totally brilliant and they are, pretty much, the only two regular characters carried over from the last two movies (which suits me fine as I never really got on with the Abe Sapien creature, although he is teased near the end). Instead with have a totally new support team who are working together for the first time here, played by Daniel Dae Kim and the truly beautiful Sasha Lane. They are also pretty awesome and, to round it off as the icing on the cake, we have Milla Jovovich playing the lead villain of the movie. And she does some pretty good work here too.

Now this movie is a complete reboot and is not associated with the del Toro movies. Which is a shame in a way because there was a definite direction for a third part which the director of that last one was clearly heading for. The question posed in Hellboy - The Golden Army was... just how was the title character going to bring about the apocalypse and, well, its a shame that never got resolved by del Toro. Except, it kinda does get resolved, somewhat, because I suspect, having not read the original comics, that this film is based, at least partially, on the same source material that would have gone into that third part that was never made. So, yeah, some of the questions posed by that last movie are, I think, answered here.

And the movie had me right from the start. Opening with a flashback and narrative provided by Mr. McShane which takes us back into Arthurian legend and upping the gore factor right from the outset, the film pulled me in very quickly. This is soon followed by a scene where Hellboy has to fight a masked luchador wrestler with vampire powers and, frankly, by this time I was already hooked on this movie, it has to be said. The action sequences are well put together, solid and, frankly, surrealistic, giant demons completely trashing London in the last reel really put a smile on my face. This is, as I said before, an epic piece of pulpy exploitation and it goes over the top in all the right places it needs to over the course of the story. And the special effects are handled really well too with my favourite being the ectoplasmic undead who are channeled physically from the mouth and into 3D representations via Sasha Lane’s truly epic character. I enjoyed her performance best, I think and her on-screen chemistry with David Harbour goes a long way towards selling this film and giving the emotional weight it requires at certain story beats.

Add into what is an already seductive mix, Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, which is a real corker and gives the movie a solid backbone. Can’t wait to hear this one as a stand alone listen when the CD is released in a few weeks.

And that’s really all I’ve got to say about Hellboy 2019 other than... some of the little reveals are a bit too obviously telegraphed but the frenetic pacing and post-modernistic tone more than make up for the lack of subtlety in the writing. This is a fun and entertaining movie and I would expect that, if you liked the last two Hellboy movies, you should have a good time with this one. And no one is more surprised than me that I would be delivering such a positive review of this movie but, there you have it. A little masterpiece of bloody excess and another winner, as far as I’m concerned, from director Neil Marshall.