31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024 - Day 16: HELLBOY - THE CROOKED MAN (2024)

Not even a tough sumbitch like Hellboy can defeat this entry's boredom.

In 1959, BPRD agents Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) attempt to transport a specimen to their organization's headquarters for study, but things go awry and they end up stranded deep in the Appalachian mountains after their train car tumbles into a dense forest. There they encounter a backwoods community of witches and an undead entity called the Crooked Man, a servant of the Devil who reaps souls obtained via diabolical contract, while still seeking to retrieve the specimen that was lost during train car separation.

This latest entry in the Hellboy franchise adapts a three-issue arc in the comics, with the source material scripted by creator Mike Mignola and drawn by a late-in-his-career Richard Corben,  the legendary illustrator whose work on the Warren line of horror comics and in HEAVY METAL magazine in the 1970's and 1980's shot him to the top tier of my ranking of favorite artists. I did not read the story arc that this film was based on, as there has been a hell of a lot of Hellboy over the past three decades, but talk about a boring waste of Richard Corben source material and spooky, backwoods witchy atmosphere. The film boasts a drab, grayish de-saturated visual tone, and that bland color palate only underscores the overall dullness of the proceedings. There are moments of spookiness involving the witches and a colossal orb weaver spider, but little else held my interest and there are no scares to speak of. And don’t get me started on the stiff who played Hellboy. Jack Kesy brought nothing to the role, and his Hellboy is simply a humorless slab who wanders from on spookhouse scenario to another.

I seldom fall asleep on movies, but I was out cold maybe twenty minutes into this and I had to start it over again from the beginning when I awoke from my torpor. Slow-moving, dull, and basically an attempt at aping an EVIL DEAD movie, this entry in the HELLBOY franchise was a huge fail for me. The first two in the series are all I ever need, especially the second one. Unless you have absolutely nothing better to do with your time, I advise giving this a miss.

Poster for the theatrical release.