Josh Reviews Hellboy: The Crooked Man

You might not know it, but they went and made another Hellboy movie!  It didn’t get a theatrical release, which is a bummer, but Hellboy: The Crooked Man is available in VOD on most streaming services, and it’s worth checking out!  (Click here to watch it right now on Amazon Prime Video!)

It’s unbelievable to me that this is the fourth Hellboy movie and the third movie version of the character.  It’s a mark of how great the Hellboy character and comic books are — masterminded by creator Mike Mignola — that Hollywood keeps going back to this well!  And yes, the comics are incredible.  The ever-expanding Hellboy comic book universe is my absolute favorite long-running comic book franchise.  It’s gloriously complex and compelling and weird, charting an alternate fantasy history that goes back centuries and extends into the future.  It’s amazing.

As for the movies?  I love both of Guillermo del Toro’s films: 2004’s Hellboy and the even-better 2008 sequel Hellboy II: The Golden Army.  Ron Perlman was perfect casting as Hellboy, and Mr. del Toro’s wonderfully bizarre and creative imagination proved a terrific match for Mike Mignola’s world.  I wish they’d been able to complete their planned trilogy.  The series was rebooted a decade later with 2019’s Hellboy, but while there are parts of that film I enjoy, as a whole I thought it didn’t quite work.  Casting Stranger Things‘ David Harbour as Hellboy was a great idea, but something was off in the execution — the makeup didn’t look quite right, and this loud, shouty version of Hellboy slightly missed the mark.

So here we are again with another new take on the character.  This new film, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, is directed by Brian Taylor, who co-wrote the film along with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden (who has written or co-written a lot of wonderful Hellboy comic books and novels).  The film is a direct adaptation of the three-issue 2008 mini-series Hellboy: The Crooked Man, written by Mr. Mignola and illustrated by Richard Corben (a phenomenal fantasy illustrator).

Whereas all three previous Hellboy films have aimed to be big and epic, The Crooked Man is a small-scale horror story set in Appalachia in 1959.  This is a low-budget film (just $20 million, from what I’ve read online) with a small cast and a small scale.  The goal here is clearly to capture the feel of the many, many great stand-along Hellboy comic book short stories, which fans love so much (and of which The Crooked Man comic-book is a strong example).  And while the other three Hellboy films have leaned more towards the approach of a superhero film, this new movie is 100% a horror film.  I can understand this approach, though the early trailers made me a little skeptical.  I was reminded instantly of the second X-Files film, I Want to Believe.  With the X-Files show over and the dream of a series of epic feature films apparently not happening, Chris Carter decided to make a smaller-scale film that emulated the series’ many beloved monster-of-the-week episodes (eschewing the grand mythology).  I like that second X-Files film, but it made me sad to see a film that felt so small.  I wanted more.  I was worried that might be the case here.

But I’m happy to report that I enjoyed Hellboy: The Crooked Man!  I’m glad I knew going in that this was going to be a small-scale, low-budget film.  Anyone expecting a movie to compete with a big-budget Marvel or DC epic is going to be disappointed.  But I enjoyed this story.

The film’s most significant win is that I loved the performance of Jack Kesy as Hellboy.  Mr. Kesy had enormous shoes to fill in taking on this role, and I was blown away by how good he was.  This is Hellboy!  Mr. Kesy nails Hellboy’s laconic, folksy attitude.  He’s brave and competent, but also dry and sarcastic, with something of a “seen it all” attitude even as he encounters new and ever-stranger demonic threats.  He’d rather be hanging out than trekking into the woods to fight monsters.  Also: major props to the makeup and prosthetics team.  They got Hellboy’s look just right.  I’m so happy.  His face looks great; the shaggy BPRD trench coat, with his red tail sticking out the back… it’s all perfect.  Well done.

Hellboy’s sidekick in the film is a rookie BPRD agent, out in the field for the first time, named Jo Song (played by Adeline Rudolph).  I really like the way Ms. Rudolph plays Jo; she’s smart and brave, but she gets scared in a realistic way when faced with these supernatural horrors.  I like her gentle banter back and forth with Hellboy.  I like that they play it like maybe there’s a little crush between these two, without making it into a Big Romantic Thing like movies often do.  Jo’s presence in the story is one of the film’s major digressions from the original Crooked Man comic book; Hellboy was solo in that adventure.  But it’s a smart change to give HB someone to play off of as the story progresses, and Ms. Rudolph has a terrific on-screen presence.  (Though I wish they’d given Jo more to do in the finale.  Her actions in the final 20-ish minutes don’t seem like they really accomplish anything.  I wish they’d found a better way to tie this character into the main plot.)  (I also wonder why they didn’t make this character Susan Xiang, a Chinese American BPRD agent who’s appeared in a lot of Hellboy comic book stories from the last decade, depicting HB’s adventures in the 1950s.  It’d have been cool to have seen Agent Xiang on-screen, and basically Jo feels like the same character, minus Xiang’s psychic abilities.)

Jefferson White plays Tom Ferrell, a young man who encountered the evil of the Crooked Man as a boy, and who’s returned to his home in the Appalachian Mountains to face him.  I’d have liked the film to have spent a little more time fleshing out Tom as a character, particularly because truly this is Tom’s story, and Hellboy and Jo are just caught in the middle of it.  Joseph Marcell (who’s probably best known for playing the butler on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) plays a spooky Reverend.  I think he slightly overplays the Reverend’s craziness in the earlier scenes; in the comic, the Reverend was more of an island of sanity in the midst of the chaos, which I think worked better for the story.  But I liked Mr. Marcell’s work as this character by the end, and he nails a few key moments late in the film.  Leah McNamara plays the villainous witch Effie Kolb, and Hannah Margetson plays Cora Fisher, a young woman caught up in the evil around her.  Both are solid, though as with Jefferson White’s Tom Ferrell, I wish the film had found a way to give a little more depth to these characters.  It’d have made the events of the story land more effectively.

I thought it was very cool that this film is based so strongly on an actual Hellboy comic book story.  I think they did a great job adapting this for a movie.  I’d love to see a series of low-budget Hellboy films, adapting other classic adventures from the comics!  That’d be cool!  (Though with this film’s having gone direct to VOD, I’m not sure that’s going to happen…)

I was pleasantly surprised they made this a period piece, setting the story in 1959 (just like the comics), as opposed to bumping it into present day.  I liked the Appalachian setting for this spooky horror story.  I was impressed that this low-budget film still kicked off with a nice banger of an action sequence — an exciting fight on a train.  That was a great hook into the film.

The film’s only major missteps for me were that I think they leaned a little too heavily into some “horror movie” stylistic tropes.  There were a few too many jump cuts; a few too many weird camera angles or cut-aways; and the score started to annoy me after a while.  I felt the source material was strong enough; i’d have liked them to have trusted the story, and the actors, and let this play out a little more naturalistically.  (Though I do understand the filmmakers’ desire to clearly differentiate this as a horror movie version of Hellboy.)

I’m happy this film exists.  It’s solidly entertaining for what it is: a small-scale, low-budget Hellboy story.  If you go in with those expectations, I think you’ll enjoy it.  I’d happily watch Jack Kesy reprise this character in additional adventures!

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