‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’ Review: Mike Mignola’s Vision Can’t Save This Dreary Movie

Hellboy The Crooked Man review

Here’s the good news: Hellboy: The Crooked Man, which is now available for purchase on VOD (Video on Demand) services in the US, is easily the most faithful version of Mike Mignola‘s world brought to the screen. The bad news is that all gets lost in between a dreary pace, confused direction, and a score that just will not stop.

Here’s the gist of the tale, which is adapted directly from the Hellboy storyline of the same name by Mignola, his frequent collaborator Christopher Golden, and director Brian Taylor. It’s 1959, and Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and his fellow B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) officer Bobbie Jo Song (Chilling Adventures of Sabrina‘s Adeline Rudolph), a book nerd and researcher, are transporting a dangerous, demonic spider back to HQ. When that arachnid escapes into the Appalachian mountains, Hellboy and Bobbie head off in pursuit and encounter something far worse.

Specifically, a small community besieged by a supernatural entity named Jeremiah Witkins, aka The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), who unfortunately brings to mind Mike Myers as Wayne Campbell impersonating The Leprechaun to freak Garth out in Wayne’s World. There are also a lot of witches, to the point that one of the characters explains that the community is mostly witches by this point.

Those witches include Leah McNamara as Effie Kolb, one of the main antagonists who delights in torturing the upright and earnest Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), a traveling companion of Hellboy and Bobbie Jo. She makes a solid impression as a cackling temptress, though is often relegated to writhing in a tree. There’s also Tom’s childhood love, Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), also a witch, who gets the movie’s best freak-out sequence when a raccoon crawls into the leftover skin of her body, and she pushes its way in, slowly inflating her like a messed up balloon. The effect is, well, effective and gross, and complementarily calls to mind some of the best effects of Troma.

And Tom, too, might be a witch as he created a lucky bone at the urging of Effie as a younger man, and sold his soul to the Crooked Man in the process. He’s never used the lucky bone, he confesses, but it’s plagued him ever since; with both Effie and The Crooked Man repeatedly tempting him to use it.

Hellboy The Crooked Man

Not to pivot right off that, but the bones of a good movie are apparent in parts of the script. You’ve got weird, backwoods Appalachia. You’ve got witches, monsters, and creeps in the night. Even the dialogue feels like it has the rhythm of Mignola’s comics.

I say “feels” because while it’s written right, it’s not delivered correctly. What it’s lacking in the direction is the humor and focus of Mignola’s works. Perhaps it’s Kesy’s Hellboy, who is chain-smoking cigarettes like he’s just played a gig at LA’s fourth-hottest dive bar, delivering every line like it was deadly serious. It’s definitely the camera work, which relies mostly on medium shots and shaky cam to give everything a false sense of immediacy, but mostly feels cramped. You may not be surprised to learn that Taylor directed Crank once you watch this — but the hyperkinetic style of that Jason Statham vehicle does not gel at all with the airy eeriness of a Mignola folktale.

It’s also definitely the score by Sven Faulconer, which bizarrely plays the spiraling strings of a jump scare nearly every thirty seconds, to the point of abstraction. And once the movie slips into action movie mode, followed by “running around the halls of a haunted house” mode, it switches gears too. There’s a lack of consistency in the soundtrack that ties directly back into the pace of the movie itself.

You might be getting this, but a lot is going on in this movie, and no real focus. The script attempts to give Hellboy a throughline by connecting his origin to the witches littered throughout the film. That plot might have worked if this was a TV pilot, or the kick-off to a movie trilogy. As is, it feels like a perfunctory attempt to give the lead something to do. The same with Rudolph, who is always a welcome presence, but has to reconcile being both the Scully of the duo, dubious about supernatural goings-on — and also dabbling in witchcraft back at headquarters. Similarly, she gets a romance storyline with Hellboy that might have made sense in the comics but comes out of nowhere two-thirds of the way through the film.

It’s particularly unfortunate because had this short movie been sold as a TV pilot — at an hour and 37 minutes, it’s the shortest Hellboy movie ever, as a piece of Prime Video’s X-Ray “trivia” told me — they may have been able to hit their stride down the road. Hellboy is tailor-made for TV, with the main character showing up in a location, being surprised there’s something supernatural and dangerous, solving the problem, then shrugging his shoulders and moving on to the next thing. While there’s a big, overarching plot, the core of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. is a supernatural procedural. That’s also at the center of the hypothetical, hour-long version of The Crooked Man.

But as is, it’s padded out with a haphazardly paced running time that spends too long on a church assault action scene, and not enough on the actual characters. Devices like chapter titles happen twice, then disappear for the rest of the movie. When we finally loop back to the spider at the beginning, it’s a head-scratcher, not connective tissue. And the performers, to crib a phrase from the internet, all have faces that look like they’ve seen an iPhone, rather than living in the backwoods of the Appalachian mountains. Likely that’s because you mostly have younger, American actors filming on the cheap in Bulgaria, when this movie needed to be fleshed out with veteran character actors to make it feel as lived in and weird as it wants to be.

This is the fourth attempt at a “theatrical” Hellboy movie, and according to Golden (who was on Comic Book Club’s live show a few weeks back), Mignola is happiest with this version. It definitely does come the closest to his vision, in terms of the relative stakes of the story being focused on one man, instead of the whole world. But it might be time to try something new with this franchise. Because any more casual fan who checks this out will likely shrug their shoulders, light up a cigarette, and move on to the next thing.

Where To Watch Hellboy: The Crooked Man

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