Review: Hellboy: The Crooked Man

As a comic, Hellboy has been running for 30-odd years now under the guidance of his creator, Mike Mignola. Things have changed a lot for the demon fated to destroy the world, and his adventures have grown creepier and closer to folklore than they were back when he was punching out Nazis and giant monsters.

The year is 1959 (well before any of the previous Hellboy films) and the chain smoking, tough talking good guy demon (Jack Kesy ) and a couple of government sidekicks are taking a demonically possessed funnelweb spider back to the lab via train. Thinks go wrong, not all the sidekicks survive, and it's left to Hellboy and rookie agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) to track down the giant spider through the Appalachian mountains. That's not all they find.

Supposedly a big part of the reason why Guillermo del Toro (director of the first two Hellboy films) didn't get to make his idea of a third was because Mignola wanted to take the character back to his roots; that's definitely one way to look at Hellboy: The Crooked Man (which is specifically based on a three-issue run of the comic).

While Hellboy himself remains the same character here, this is a pretty big pivot to small scale horror for the big screen version, in ways that those looking for pulp action might find off-putting. There's no evil end-of-the-world cult or giant monsters or Nazi hold-outs to punch here: ok, there are a few zombies at one point. But this is much more about a creeping sense of dread, of people stumbling into a place that's gone rotten with bad magic.

A lot of the small moments are memorably creepy. There's a witch who leaves her skin behind to roam the woods as a raccoon; another witch rides a horse that turns out to be someone's enslaved father. The main evil haunting the mountain is called The Crooked Man, a walking hanged corpse who sells souls to the Devil for a cent apiece in an attempt to rebuild his long gone fortune.

The main plot is straightforward: Hellboy and Song team up with newly returned local Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) to purge the area of evil, which involves battling the local population (now basically all witches) and defeating The Crooked Man. But for long stretches, it's the kind of story where unsettling things just happen. 

There's asides explaining how to make witchballs and summon up a demon, hints of portals and Lovecraftian monsters, a number of dream sequences featuring Hellboy's mother, a grim joke or two, and at least one character dies for (again, memorably creepy) reasons that are never quite explained... which is kind of the point. They've stumbled into a place where bad things just happen, and a certain dream-like quality is to be expected.

Still, there are also points where this doesn't quite work, rough edges that feel more the result of an uneven script (co-written by Mignola himself) and low budget than firm intentions. Director Brian Taylor (the Crank films, the second, more demented Ghost Rider movie) does a decent job of balancing the unsettling mood with some high energy weirdness (there's the occasional Evil Dead vibe to proceedings), but the whole thing never fully comes together like it should.

If this film manages to chart a new direction for Hellboy, smaller in scope but bigger in strangeness, that wouldn't be such a bad thing. As the film handling the pivot, this struggles to straddle two worlds; it's those memorable moments that stand out, like pennies scattered on an old floor.

- Anthony Morris