Indie studio Ketchup Entertainment has a new Hellboy movie out, but you won’t find it Hellboy: The Crooked Man hits theaters this week. It’s a small film: no big stars, a limited theatrical release only in the UK and Belgium. It was transferred to digital offerings without much fanfare. So the exercise of going over it feels a bit like kicking a corrupt man while he’s down. The film has already been buried: Does it make sense to exhume its body to enumerate why it’s not worth your $19.99 VOD money?
You can already see that there are more paragraphs here, so… Yeah. Hellboy: The Crooked Man has a lot of small problems, but there’s a major conceptual flaw here that should serve as a warning to anyone trying to reboot Mike Mignola’s comic as a film series for the fourth time. Filmmakers need to stop trying to adapt Hellboy stories directly into feature films based on visual realism. It does the character – indeed, the entire concept – a disservice.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man based on the Hellboy comic of the same nameBut the film’s first departure from this story comes in the opening sequence, which stars son-of-Satan-turned-paranormal-investigator Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and agent Bobbie Jo Song (an original character created for the film). by Adeline Rudolph) survive a train accident and become stranded in the Appalachian wilderness. From there they come across the original plot of the Crooked man
The remarkable thing about this train crash frame is that it noises This is a great way to give newcomers a quick overview of who Hellboy is, why he looks the way he does, and how he became a paranormal investigator before we get into the main plot. But while the script makes sure to let us know that Jo is a desk agent and has no experience in field work, there is no actual mention of the agency (presumably the comics’ Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense?) that she and Hellboy work with work because there is only a single reference to the fact that their boss is called “Broom”, which is not explained in more detail. Crooked man
This gives the whole opening a sort of fan film feel, reinforced by some real B-movie CGI of Hellboy fighting a monster enemy, shot in poorly timed cuts that try to disguise how rare he is doesn’t quite succeed and his opponent occupies the frame at the same time. Kesys latex make-up and red right hand are valiant efforts, but they’re still more cosplay than movie costume.
Image: Ketchup Entertainment
The acting Crooked man ranges from forgettable to bad, with a selection of particularly exaggerated “yokel accents”. Sometimes director Brian Taylor (of the Nicolas Cage film) mom and dadand the Neveldine and Taylor team who made the Crank films, playerAnd Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance) highlights the 1950s setting, as an older local woman remarks that Jo looks like a “little oriental doll.” At other times it just doesn’t work out. (“Helter Skelter” scrawled on the walls of a haunted house?)
The pacing is terrible and the exposition is forced. (It’s simply the height of screenwriter laziness for Hellboy, knowing that tentacle gods are real beyond time and space, to refer to something as “a Lovecraft-esque scenario.”) And the original additions to the story, like Jo, are flat and non-additive. That’s a shame for the only female character in the film who isn’t damned for eternity one way or another. An extended ending turns the comic’s classic Mignola-style Unsettling Reveal Anticlimax into a last-minute, three-way emotional development action sequence.
But the real problem is, even if Taylor hadn’t made any of these stumbles Crooked manhe would still be trying to bend a Hellboy comic – a comic book institution characterized by highly stylized, sparsely worded, short, disjointed stories – to fit into a long, visually realistic, dark film. Crooked man and the 2019 David Harbor vehicle Hell boy Show that if you translate the one-off plot of a Hellboy story directly into a new medium without retaining its stylization, brevity, or humor, all you get is a watered-down, cliché-filled B-movie with a flat, unlikeable atmosphere.
It doesn’t matter how many characters you have Say it loudly that Hellboy has more in common with the monsters he hunts than the people he protects. When your actors, directors and screenwriters don’t really see eye to eye show the sadness and vulnerability in Hellboy’s heart – not to mention the self-aware humor of “Pamcakes!” or “Is that a monkey?” or “Don’t mess with me, lady. I drank with skeletons” – it will mean Nothing.
Image: Mike Mignola/Dark Horse Comics
When Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy films work – and not always! – This is because they borrow liberally from more action-packed cinematic comic adaptations such as: Men in Black and contemporary superhero films that extend the Hellboy model beyond the framework of a tried-and-tested three-act action film while retaining the humor and pathos of the comic. And they work because they have del Toro, the greatest living practical effects monster design director in Hollywood today, and veteran camp action production designer Stephen Scott, who gives every inch of these two weird, wonderful films a unique design feel that lasts Be amazed by the hyper-real impact of Mignola’s cartoons.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man has many problems – so many that they perhaps obscure the most important thing. People need to stop trying to adapt Hellboy stories into film form and start making movies – or TV shows! Or an animated series! – that suited the Hell boy Mold.
