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.
No comments:
Post a Comment