In 1959, Hellboy (Jack Kesey) and rookie BPRD agent Bobby Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) come face to face with a returning Soul Eater called the Twisted Man (Martin Passendale).
Here we go then: Hellboy Takes Three. After Guillermo del Toro’s brilliant double bill from 2004 to 2008 and Neil Marshall’s bloated attempt in 2019 to move things into more gritty action horror territory, we’re now getting the purists’ approach. Directed by Brian ‘Crank’ Taylor, who also co-wrote the script with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (based heavily on his limited edition series), Hellboy: The Crooked Man strips away the fantasy setting and relegates its demonic hero to ground level, as it were, in a cooler. Low-res stout.
Similar to Matt Reeves’ The Batman, thankfully, there’s no attempt to retell Hellboy’s origin story. We’ve just arrived at another day at the office – or rather, a field trip – where we meet Red and his attractive girlfriend (Adeline Rudolph) as they transport a magically mutated funnel-web spider from A to B. Shit quickly heads south in a small train crash/conflict scene Among Monsters, which is fun enough to forgive the obvious limitations of the visual effects and offer some hope for what comes next. However, once the main plot begins, this hope is quickly dashed.
The problem is that with a low range, there is also a sharp reduction in risk. Whereas previously we saw a man created to end the world and having to save this world (which he understandably hates and fears), here he is irrationally messing around with a supernatural domestic nuisance in a barely populated bunker in Nowheresville.
It feels more like a new movie than a lost pilot for a 90s monster-of-the-week TV show.
Oddly enough, its inhabitants don’t bat an eyelid when this burly, red-tailed demon man walks up, a response happily explained by a passing reference to Hellboy’s recent appearance in Life magazine. It strips away all the tension you’d expect from its inherent outsider presence, a dramatic weakness that’s only exacerbated by a rapid flurry of exposition-laden scenes involving witches, a magical cat bone, and a villain covered in prosthetics who looks like a crucifix. Between Abraham Lincoln and Waldorf from The Muppets.
The new visibly skinny Hellboy is Jack Casey, most likely best known as Black Tom Cassidy in Deadpool 2. Unfortunately, unlike Ron Perlman or David Harbour, Casey lacks the screen presence required to shine through heavy makeup, and spends most of the time. A film of snoring obscenely and smoking in a strangely disturbing manner. Meanwhile, Taylor over-relies on a narrow range of visual tricks (primarily smudged fisheye lenses) that only add to the feeling of disorientation as we flit between separate scenes via occasional, seemingly random intertitles.
Maybe hardcore Hellboy heads will get something out of The Crooked Man, but it feels more like a new movie than a lost pilot for a ’90s monster-of-the-week TV show that never aired.
As brave as this low-budget attempt to recapture Hellboy is, it unfortunately lacks the storytelling and stylistic savvy to rise above its all-too-obvious budget constraints.
