Movie review «Hellboy: The Crooked Man»

On September 19, a superhero horror movie started showing in cinemas «Hellboy: The Crooked Man», based on Mike Mignola’s comic book of the same name, which was published by Dark Horse in 2008. After Guillermo del Toro’s nice but not profitable dilogy and Neil Marshall’s selective trash, this is the third attempt by a new team of filmmakers to bring the adventures of the red demon from hell to the cinema screen. Local filmmakers have a say in how well it worked out in the review below. 

«Hellboy: The Crooked Man» 

Genre superhero horror movie
Director Brian Taylor
Starring Jack Kesey, Martin Bassindale, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Joseph Marzell, Leah McNamara, Anna Margetson
Premiere movie theaters
Year of issue 2024
Website IMDb 

At the end of the 1950s, agents of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Protection, Hellboy and Bobby’s girlfriend Jo Song, are engaged in the transportation of a valuable cargo. However, a force majeure situation leads to an accident, as a result of which the heroes find themselves in a strange forest located somewhere in the Appalachians.

Stumbling upon a small village, the newly-minted travelers meet a young man named Tom Ferrell, who in his turbulent youth got involved with a seductive witch and almost became an adept of the dark force himself, but stopped in time. He is now trying hard to fence himself off from these connections.

Meanwhile, it turns out that in this godforsaken wilderness, you can run into a witch wherever you spit, and the ball is run by the sinister and slightly skewed figure of the mysterious Crooked Man — a local collector of sinful souls who hasn’t visited a dentist in centuries. Well, it becomes obvious that there is work for Hellboy in this uncomfortable place. It’s hard to believe that the very first film adaptation he comic book series about Hellboy by the famous monster fan Guillermo del Toro was released in Ukrainian cinemas exactly 20 years ago, in September 2004. And although the red creature of hell, played by the unsurpassed Ron Perlman, radiated an unusually expressive sentimentality (love of cats and hot Liz Sherman included), the film was well received by the audience and critics. The only pity is that the money raised was not enough to recoup the budget.

The sequel with the subtitle «The Golden Army» suffered roughly the same fate, and although the box office was noticeably higher, it was still not enough to talk about any earnings. Despite the great desire and plans of del Toro and Ron Perlman to complete their story with a trilogy, this project was not destined to come true. Instead, in 2019, we got a reboot from Neil Marshall, with David Harbour and Milla Jovovich at the center of the conflict. Despite the brutal style, which was in stark contrast to del Toro’s delicate approach, the result was a shameful failure that had no chance of continuing. And today, somehow even unexpectedly, a new reboot appears, which no one asked for. The director Brian Taylor, who, after working on «Ghost Rider 2», is no stranger to adapting a cartoon about all sorts of infernal things, tried to be as close as possible to the comic book of the same name. At the same time, the creators’ attention is focused mainly on horror, to some extent even with the addition of «folk». That is, bizarre monsters from dark fantasy are not frequent guests here, unlike their predecessors. And in general, the story looks much more grounded. 

But Taylor’s film doesn’t work properly in a given genre or subgenre. It seems to be a homage to the classics, trying to recreate a dark atmosphere, but it simply lacks truly frightening horrors. A small-town uprising from the graves of the ominous dead, borrowing a musical theme from «The Thing» Carpenter or a hostile bird that migrated here or from «The Crow» or with «The Birds» the maestro Hitchcock himself. 

There is no sane action here either; in this context, even the trashy version of Marshall looked much more advantageous. As for weapons, the characters can only rely on the magical bone of a dead cat, a blessed shovel (to be fair, both artifacts appeared in the comic book), and the usual big gun for the protagonist, but there are not many reasons to use it either. 

The same goes for all the other performers — for example, the only thing that can be said about Adeline Rudolph, who played Hellboy’s partner, is that the character did not appear in the comic book, and the actress herself is to embody Kitana in the upcoming sequel to the film adaptation Mortal Kombat. The somewhat «leprechaun-like» image of Martin Bassindale, who is running around with his own «pot of gold», revives this stillborn story a bit, but it’s not enough to inspire a powerful fear.

After the premiere of «The Crooked Man», we can state two facts. The first is that over these 20 years in Ukraine, the titular character has managed to turn from Hellboy into Gellboy. At the same time, unlike the del Toros dilogy back then, today we have high-quality Ukrainian dubbing in our cinemas. And the second, no less important point is that producers are ready to allocate less and less money for each subsequent appearance of the tailed giant with carefully cut horns, and creators are ready to lower the quality bar. At this rate, the tireless craftsmen from The Asylum studio will soon pay attention to Mignola’s comics.