Fans of comic books, 00s horror and Guillermo del Toro will recall the latter’s crack at launching a mass-market franchise with Hellboy in 2004, a peppy blend of pulp genre thrills, wisecracks and old-school effects with a very del Torovian occult-vibe. The casting in the title role of Ron Perlman as the half-demon/half-human shorn-horned, red-skinned, wisecracking, cigar-smoking good guy, along with Selma Blair as his pale but decidedly interesting sidekick/love interest Liz, is what made the first film, and to a lesser degree its successor Hellboy II: The Golden Army, sing. But the unholy mess of a reboot from 2019, this time with a not-unlikeable David Harbour in the massive Right Hand of Doom glove, barely made coin, which makes this even lower-budgeted successor somewhat inexplicable. Just as Hellboy can smell evil in the forest air where others catch only the scent of pine, there’s a whiff of creative accounting about this effort.
This time, the man under the metric ton of makeup is Jack Kesy, a pretty wan replacement for his predecessors who doesn’t even look convincing while smoking. Set in the 1950s, Hellboy is working for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense alongside agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph, the best thing in the film), an eager beaver in contrast to Hellboy the cynic. An escaped CGI spider (don’t ask) causes the two to rock up somewhere in the forests of Appalachia where the search for a phone gets them mixed up with hillbilly witches and gateways to hell. Local guy Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), newly returned from war to find his parents are seemingly dead, enlists Hellboy and Bobbie Jo to help him save his old sweetheart Cora (Hannah Margetson), who has been bewitched by local enchantress Effie (Leah McNamara, who is at least having fun with the ham serving). And bopping around the place cackling is nemesis the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), who is a pretty boring foe apart from the dapper top hat.
Presumably the reduced budget partly explains the emphasis on cheaply rendered folk-horror elements; there’s lots of wire-work here that puts the women in flowing dresses as they levitate eerily, but the cinematography looks like it was shot on hellaciously cheap cameras. Then again, no amount of budget could make up for the sputtering mess of a script, or the dead-on-the-inside expressions of the cast – apart from Rudolph who is consistently watchable.
• Hellboy: The Crooked Man is out in the UK and Ireland on 27 September, and in Australia on 10 October.
