Director – Brian Taylor – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 99m
**1/2
Hellboy must confront a dark labyrinth of hills, the Crooked Man who tricks people out of their souls, and some unresolved family matter from his own past– latest franchise reboot is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 13th
1959. Hellboy (Jack Kesy), his assistant Jo (Adeline Rudolph) and an FBI man are transporting a deadly spider in a boxcar across the Appalachians to a lab where Jo can subject it to further study when the creature goes berserk, busts out of its crate, precipitating a terrible struggle in which the FBI man is killed and their boxcar is thrown down a steep embankment. They have arrived in a place where, we later learn in dialogue, a network of mining tunnels acts like veins to the living creature that is the hills, and the authorities have built a church atop the hills in the exact place where a portal used to connect a world of demonic forces with our own world.
The area is frequently visited by the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), who carries with him numerous coins, each one representing a soul he has tricked into selling him- or herself to the Devil. A local man, Tom (Jefferson White from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024; Eileen, William Oldroyd, 2023), has returns to the area in search of his lost love Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson) who got mixed up in all this via witchcraft, in particular the witch Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara). Tom carries with him a lucky bone which has the power to do great damage to people, although being an essentially good soul, he has never used it for fear of inflicting harm on the recipients.
Hellboy and Jo must venture up to the Crooked Man’s decrepit mansion atop the hill system, stopping at the old church on the way where they meet the blind Reverend (Joseph Marcell from The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Chiwetel Ejiofor, 2019; Cry Freedom, Richard Attenborough, 1987) as the church comes under siege from witches who cannot enter upon its consecrated ground. While Hellboy and Tom go on up to the Crooked Man’s house to confront him once and for all, Jo – an amateur witch who dabbles in magic – and the reverend venture at her insistence down a shaft leading into the labyrinth of mines…
The first Hellboy feature to be co-scripted by the character’s comic book creator Mike Mignola, this eschews the big budget special effects approach of the two Guillermo del Toro adaptations (Hellboy, 2004; Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 2008) in favour of a smaller, more intimate picture with a handful of characters, rural locations (the film was shot in Bulgaria) and an emphasis on folk horror underpinned by a half-baked, ill-thought out Christian theology.
High points include the laughably funny fight with a giant spider right at the start, with a rock and roll soundtrack accompanying the mayhem as if setting the tone for what is to follow, a misjudgement since the remainder plays out altogether less humourous and darker in tone; and a sequence where a woman is suspended in mid-air and a (somewhat obviously CG-generated) snake appears from between her legs, winds around her torso and enters her mouth, as if she were threaded on a circular length of rope.
Mignola’s script input means there’s a lot in here about where Hellboy came from, in particular with his mother’s being caught up by demonic forces, but when the narrative gets to those, it seems to throw them away when it could have built something really impressive with them. Marcell’s blind priest is arguably the best thing here, embodying a force against the forces of darkness and emblazoning the blade of an old shovel with a Christian cross of light to fight the forces of darkness (he hits them with it!). Hellboy’s prosthetics makeup is well up to par, although underneath it Kesy doesn’t quite possess the charisma of Ron Perlman, who played the character in the del Toro films. Although it certainly has its moments, overall this is a disappointment.
Hellboy: The Crooked Manis out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 13th.
Trailer: