Like an Episode of a Larger Series

Hellboy hasn’t exactly been treated well by Hollywood. His first two movies, under the watchful eye of Guillermo del Toro were solid even if each film had its individual flaws. The first film dubbed over Doug Jones’s voice, muting that fantastic actor’s performance, while the second film was very pretty but the plot wasn’t as good. Meanwhile, the 2019 film was just bad. Poorly written, poorly edited, absolutely terribly filmed. Just bad. Hellboy, a character with a long, rich history in his comic series (and all its spin-off and ancillary materials) is absolutely due a movie that treats him properly.

It seemed like, for 2024, the character might finally get the film he was due. Comic writer, and Hellboy creator, Mike Mignola came on board to help write the screenplay alongside director Brian Taylor, and they were working off source material from Mignola’s own series. With a small budget of only $20 Mil (smaller than any previous adaptation) any film made from it would presumably be a hit since the character has some name recognition and people aren’t opposed to superhero films in this era, just bad superhero films. Surely this film could be a hit.

It wasn’t. For whatever reason Ketchup Media, the film’s distributor, only put the film out in international markets, where it promptly died. The film didn’t get an official, theatrical release in North America, and then it was quietly put out on home media so it could be quickly forgotten. It was almost as if they decided to write the film off, assuming no one would want to see it and no one would care about this new adaptation. Which, maybe was true because, having watched this film, I honestly don’t know if it could have been a hit even with proper distribution and word of mouth putting it out there.

The film is set in the 1950s with Hellboy (Jack Kesy), alongside research agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), transporting a demonically evil spider (yes, really) via train back to the BPRD for safe study and storage. Unfortunately the spider, which has been drugs and stowed safely, awakens and grows massively in size, causing a massive fight in the traincar and spilling itself, Hellboy, and Bobbie Jo out into the Appalachian wilderness. The spider, now loose, does shrink back down, but it crawls into a nearby mine grate and is immediately lost in the inky black below.

Realizing they’ll need assistance in finding and recapturing the spider, Hellboy and Bobbie Jo head towards a nearby settlement in search of a phone. They don’t actually find one, as this is backwoods Virginia in the middle of the 1950s, but they do stumble on something more curious instead: witches. The land is cursed, with the people suffering under the magic of Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara), a devout follower of The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), a force sent to corrupt souls and send them on to the Devil. A local man, and possible witch himself, Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), comes to their aid, knowing the land and the magic within. Teamed together, our three heroes will have to fight The Crooked Man if they are to have any hope of escaping this land (let alone finding that evil, demonic spider again).

Hellboy is an interesting character. A creature of hell sent to Earth to act as an agent of the devil, Hellboy (due to the way he was raised) instead rejects his mission, wanting only to help and fight the forces of evil. This is a rich characterization and solid backstory worth exploring in film, and that was one of the great things about del Toro’s two films: it took the character seriously and gave us enough of his characterization while still letting the action and adventure of the superhero film unfold. This, sadly, is a major factor missing in this movie.

The Hellboy of Hellboy: The Crooked Man, is flat and uninteresting. He’s written as if the people watching the film already should know who he is and what his motivations are, instead ignoring most of that so the film can have random crap happen on screen around him. This is a reboot, though, that throws away all previous continuity from the other films and puts us fresh into the story. While I appreciate that the film doesn’t feel the need to rehash Hellboy’s origin story again, instead dropping us right into the action, it might actually do too efficient of a job because we’re not really left with much to grasp onto for our lead character or his adventure.

Hellboy, whatever the creators of this film might have thought otherwise, is not SupermanThe first big superhero from DC Comics, Superman has survived any number of pretenders to the throne, besting not only other comic titans but even Wolrd War II to remain one of only three comics to continue publishing since the 1940s.. While the character has been around since 1993 (marking over thirty years in print in some form) he doesn’t have the same level of name recognition as the Man of Steel (or SpidermanSure, DC Comics has Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but among the most popular superheroes stands a guy from Marvel Comics, a younger hero dressed in red and blue who shoots webs and sticks to walls. Introduced in the 1960s, Spider-Man has been a constant presence in comics and more, featured in movies regularly since his big screen debut in 2002., BatmanOne of the longest running, consistently in-print superheroes ever (matched only by Superman and Wonder Woman), Batman has been a force in entertainment for nearly as long as there's been an entertainment industry. It only makes sense, then that he is also the most regularly adapted, and consistently successful, superhero to grace the Silver Screen., Wonder WomanLong considered the third pillar of the DC Comics "Trinity", Wonder Woman was one of the first female superheroes ever created. Running for as long as Batman or Superman (and without breaks despite a comic downturn in the 60s that killed superhero comics for about a decade), Wondie has the honor to be one of the longest serving, and most prolific, superheroes ever., or a few others). His films haven’t been as successful, and while I wouldn’t necessarily call him a niche character he certainly appeals more to comic fans in the know than general audiences. You have to work to make people interested in this character, and that includes imparting rich characterization and solid background in his films, which Hellboy: The Crooked Man does not do.

Hellboy in this film doesn’t have a rich character arc. Hell, he doesn’t have much of an arc at all. His job is to show up, fight demons, and then go home and, yes, that is what he does here but there’s barely anything else to his character at all. The film drops a couple of breadcrumbs of origin for him, which it barely explores (and probably set up as something to hook us for a sequel) but otherwise just leaves Hellboy to his own devices while horrific shit happens around him. The hero is the shallowest part of this story.

The best character of the film is Bobbie Jo, a researcher looking to learn more about field work so she can feel useful. That would be an interesting arc for the character, having her questing to be better at her job, only to learn that field work is tougher and scarier than she expected. Some kind of morality play feels baked into her character arc, a “be careful what you wish for” style of story… except the film doesn’t really follow through on that, either. Yes, it gives her the setup for it, and then brings her to a point where she has to make a choice, to decide if she’s going to embrace darkness to help fight evil, whatever the consequences might be. But then it doesn’t bring any consequences. Again, feeling like they set up something for a later film, we only get half the arc for her character without anything after.

While watching the film I was left with this vibe like this was an episode for a larger Hellboy series. Not even a pilot episode, mind you, but a middle story giving us one of many adventures the heroes have been on around the country. It reminded me of a Kids in the Hall sketch where there wasn’t a beginning or an end, just a middle, and it’s just as weird and nonsensical as it sounds. Why is the spider possessed by a demon? Don’t worry about it. What happens to the Appalachian town now that The Crooked Man is dead? Doesn’t matter. Will our characters figure out what this adventure could mean for their life going forward? Inconsequential. This movie is all middle, no intro and no conclusion, and it feels less for it.

But then it doesn’t help that the actual action of the story feels slapdash and half-baked. The film has a lot of concepts it throws at us about witchcraft and demons and the supernatural. But it imparts all of this not by showing but by telling. The film often halts to give backstory for the side characters, or to explain how some spell works, or what The Crooked Man has been up to, and every time it’s like the film is lecturing at us, hoping we understand another random concept, another magical doohickey that will only be useful a scene later before getting discarded. It doesn’t amount to much long term, especially when we expect that once the adventure is over nothing we learned here will matter afterwards.

The fact that almost all the characters we meet have very thick, backwoods accents that are hard to understand certainly makes the film harder to watch. There’s a balance between verisimilitude and legibility this film doesn’t quite understand, and having a bunch of people talking at each other in thick, hillbilly drawls while saying hard to parse magical concepts makes the film feel obtuse and uninteresting. The film’s big ideas get muddled when the audience can understand half of it and doesn’t care about what it can understand. It doesn’t work.

And it’s all in service of a supernatural creature that barely amounts to a villain at all. The Crooked Man is scarier in concept than execution, a shadowy figure whose power comes from what he promises others more than what he can do himself. Once The Crooked Man is revealed, he feels less than, disinteresting and barely there. Most of what he does from his reveal forward is mess with characters’ minds while making them run around for a bit. It’s a case of nothing that happens on screen is real so we can’t trust what we’re seeing, which actually makes us less interested in the action. Dreamlike escapes work when they’re grounded in a reality we understand, but we don’t understand this backwoods world and we never get invested in it, so nothing matters. It’s just the heroes running around for a bit before, oops, the villain dies. Well, that was an adventure, I guess.

There’s potential in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, which makes its failure feel sadder. The production team used their small budget to great effect, creating a backwoods area that feels lived in, with solid costumed, good sets, and halfway decent effects. There’s a solid Hammer Films vibe, a thought that this film could tap into that way back era of classic horror thrillers. Clearly this movie aspired to be like those old films, a psychological and supernatural thriller that evokes the bygone era, but it never actually has anything to say. It’s a film working entirely on vibes, not substance, and vibes can only get you so far.

I wanted to like Hellboy: The Crooked Man. I really did. The first twenty minutes or so are great as the film gets into its setup and drops us into the action. But once the story, such as it is, gets going and the characters are introduced and the magic on screen starts getting explained, that’s when it all falls apart. The film was great when it was just Hellboy fighting a giant spider. The start and the end are all about that and they’re the most enjoyable parts. Everything in the middle, though, is just so much filler that amounts to nothing. This film was never going to be a hit because it really didn’t have anything to say about its main character or this adventure. Clearly the studios knew it, and they tried to euthanize it as quickly as possible. Maybe one day we’ll get a good film based on the character again, but this was not that day.