By Sandra Hall
HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN ★★
(MA15+) 99 minutes
The heroic comic book monster Hellboy first hit the screen in 2004 when Mexican director Guillermo del Toro took him up, impressed by his cynical attitude to authority and ready talent for the laconic putdown. The result was a success – a self-aware salute to the old-fashioned horror movie – and del Toro produced an equally popular sequel.
It’s hard to raise a laugh in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, starring Jack Kesy as Hellboy and Adeline Rudolph as Bobbie Jo Song.
That was it until 2019, when Hellboy returned with a different lead actor and director, only to meet with complete indifference. The film was an unequivocal flop. Nonetheless, he’s back again in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, a backwoods ghost story that has him battling an army of disinterred corpses commanded by the devil. It’s a story drawn directly from one of the comic books, which may please the fans, but the doom-struck Appalachian setting and hyperactive cast of occult shape-shifters takes us a long way from del Toro’s slick vision of the Hellboy world.
Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), his colleague from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, are on a train when the rare spider they are transporting to a research laboratory escapes its box, executes a radical growth spurt and derails the train, depositing them in the woods.
Friendly faces are rare in this corner of the country, but they manage to hook up with Tom Ferrell (Yellowstone’s Jefferson White), who’s returning home for the first time in years. He offers to help them, since witches are all over the neighbourhood, and he’s personally acquainted with several of them.
Sniffing the wind, it takes Hellboy little time to detect “the stink” of evil, and only a moment more to realise we have been set down in a howling, shrieking, creaking gothic horror playground. A swooping chorus of agitated crows carry the main theme, and along the way, we encounter a couple of levitating spectres pleading for liberation from their hellish torments, as well as various forms of wildlife with a propensity for inserting themselves into comatose bodies. Body horror is a major feature.
Even after Hellboy and Bobbie Jo find temporary sanctuary in a church run by a preacher who’s blind and guilt-ridden, there is little incentive to stick around, but Hellboy can’t resist a challenge. And by then he’s met the Crooked Man – a crook-backed old codger desperately in need of a dentist – and learnt he’s actually the devil. From then on, it’s war. The cemetery is soon swarming with corpses who have pushed aside their gravestones and decided to rejoin the world upstairs.
It’s all too much. The horrors are piled on in such quantities that any possibility of being scared or even slightly repulsed soon evaporates. Instead, you look on in a detached state of wonder at the number of cliches director Brian Taylor has dredged up from the swampy reaches of horror movie history. It’s so depressing, Hellboy’s one-liners are hard put to raise a laugh.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man was released in cinemas on October 10.
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