“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” is the second movie reboot of the demonic superhero, this time played by Jack Kesy. Hellboy was created by writer/artist Mike Mignola in 1993 and has since starred in countless comics published at Dark Horse. A demon named Anung Un Rama, Hellboy was summoned to Earth in the final days of World War II by the Nazi operation Project Ragna Rok. Instead of becoming the Third Reich’s ultimate weapon, however, he was adopted by the American Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) and is the bureau’s top agent.
Hellboy is half a fantasy pulp hero, half a procedural detective; most of his stories are short and small-scale, and he faces supernatural horrors with the same attitude an exterminator does a wasp nest. “The Crooked Man” — following Hellboy fighting a sadistic ghost in the Appalachian mountains — looks like it had some good ideas. The comic story (drawn by Richard Corben) is beloved. The small scale horror vibes? That’s not just a matter of budget, it’s what most “Hellboy” comics are like. The series trade paperbacks include intros for each story, written by Mignola, where he explains how he came across or read some piece of folklore and decided to draw a comic that threw Hellboy into that fable.
But the film’s production has sent up flags as red as Hellboy’s flesh. Director Brian Taylor (“Jonah Hex,” “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”) does not have an inspiring resume. Meanwhile, “The Crooked Man” trailers have earned many comparisons to YouTube fan-films, with the Syfy movie color grading not helping; the film looked cheap, not restrained.
We also recently learned that “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” will be skipping theatrical distribution in the U.S. and instead releasing via video-on-demand come October 8. With all these warning signs, fans are once again shouting that they want Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy 3.” I do too, but it does rub me the wrong way when people suggest Hellboy belongs to del Toro or that the character was only ever good when del Toro was handling him. Mignola’s comics are brilliant and none of the “Hellboy” films have quite reached their bar.