Indie studio Ketchup Entertainment has released a new Hellboy movie, but you won’t find it Hellboy: The Crooked Man in theaters this week. It’s a small film: no big stars, a limited theatrical release only in Britain and Belgium. It was sent to digital listings without much fanfare. So the exercise of judging it feels a bit like kicking a crooked man while he’s on the ground. The movie is already buried: is there any point in digging up the corpse to list the ways in which it isn’t worth your $19.99 in VOD money?
You can already tell there are more paragraphs here, so… Yeah. Hellboy: The Crooked Man has a lot of patchy issues, but there’s a larger conceptual flaw here that should serve as a warning to anyone attempting to reboot Mike Mignola’s comic as a film franchise for the fourth time. Filmmakers need to stop trying to adapt Hellboy stories directly into feature films built around visual realism. It does the character – in fact, the entire concept – a disservice.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is based on the Hellboy comic of the same namebut the film’s first deviation from that story comes in the opening scene, in which Satan’s son turned paranormal investigator Hellboy (Jack Kesy), and agent Bobbie Jo Song (an original character created for the film, played by Adeline Rudolph), a train accident and ends up stranded in the wilderness of the Appalachians. From there they stumble upon the original plot of the Crooked person comic book, a three-issue story written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and drawn by Richard Corben. Hellboy and Jo join a local man, Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), who sets out to rescue a woman suspected of being a witch from her demise, even as he is pursued by the “Crooked Man,” a cop of the devil.
What’s remarkable about this train wreck frame is that it is sounds as a great way to give newbies a quick recap of who Hellboy is, why he looks the way he does, and how he became a paranormal investigator, all before getting to the main story. But while the script takes care to let us know that Jo is a bureau agent and has no experience in field work, there is no actual mention of the agency (presumably the comic’s Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense?) where she and Hellboy work. because only a single reference to their boss being called ‘Broom’, which has not yet been addressed. Crooked person has zero ramp for people unfamiliar with Hellboy, something wild to leave out a so-called ‘reboot’.
That gives the whole opening the feel of a fan film, which is enhanced by some real B-movie CGI of Hellboy fighting a monster enemy, shot in poorly timed snippets that try, but don’t quite succeed, to cover up how rarely he and his opponent occupy the frame at the same time. Kesy’s latex makeup and red right hand are valiant efforts, but they’re still more cosplay than movie costume.
The acting in Crooked person ranges from unmemorable to bad, with a selection of particularly exaggerated ‘joke accents’. Sometimes director Brian Taylor (of the Nicolas Cage film Mom and Dadand the team of Neveldine and Taylor that made the Crank films, GamerAnd Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance) takes care to emphasize the 1950s setting, as when an older local woman comments that Jo looks like a “little oriental doll.” Other times, things just don’t click in time. (“Helter Skelter” scrawled across the walls of a haunted house?)
The pacing is terrible and the exposition is forced. (It’s just the height of screenwriter laziness to refer Hellboy, who knows that tentacle gods from outside time and space are real, to something like “a Lovecraft-esque screenplay.”) 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 somehow damned for eternity. An extended ending turns the classic Mignola-style Unsettling Reveal Anticlimax into a last-minute three-way action sequence for emotional development.
But the real problem is that even if Taylor hadn’t made any of those stumbles Crooked personwould he still be trying to warp a Hellboy comic – a comics institution defined by highly stylized, sparsely worded, short, disjointed stories – to fit into a long, visually realistic, grainy film. Crooked person and the 2019 David Harbor vehicle Hellboy showing that if you translate the blow-by-blow plot of a Hellboy story directly into a new medium without retaining its stylization, brevity, or humor, you just get a watered-down, cliché-ridden B-movie with a flat, implausible protagonist.
It doesn’t matter how many times you have characters say it out loud that Hellboy has more in common with the monsters he hunts than with the people he protects. When your actors, director and screenwriters are not really united to show the sadness and vulnerability in Hellboy’s heart – let alone the self-aware humor of ‘Pam cakes!” 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 that’s not always the case! – it’s because they borrow liberally from more action-oriented cinematic comic adaptations like Men in black and contemporary superhero films, stretching the Hellboy model over the skeleton of a tried-and-true three-act action film, while retaining the humor and pathos of the comic. And they work because they have Del Toro, the greatest living director of practical effects monster design in Hollywood today, and veteran camp action production designer Stephen Scott to give every inch of these two strange, wonderful films a unique design feel that comes at a can take a punch. in for the hyperreal effect of Mignola’s cartoons.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man has many problems – so many that the most important of them may be overlooked. People need to stop trying to fit Hellboy stories into a movie format and start making movies – or TV shows! Or an animated series! – that match the Hellboy mold.
