Jack Kesy in Hellboy: The Crooked Man (2024)

‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’ movie review: grim adaptation lacks the fun of the earlier movies

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A half-demon paranormal researcher stumbles across a supernatural entity haunting the Appalachian Mountains in the 1950s in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, now available on VOD services in the U.S. after a brief theatrical run in foreign territories. This adaptation of one of the most popular Hellboy tales from the Dark Horse comics tells a more coherent story than the 2019 reboot, but lacks the splashy monster movie fun that fans have come to expect from the series.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man stars Jack Kesy in the titular role, replacing Ron Perlman from the earlier Guillermo del Toro movies and David Harbour from the 2019 version. At the film’s outset, he and Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense rookie Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) are transporting a dangerous creature by train in the stark landscape of rural eastern America (played by locations in Bulgaria).

When the creature breaks out, we’re clued into one of the big departures for this Hellboy film. It’s a spider that can quickly grow to a giant size… that looks like a video game asset that has been poorly composited, especially when Hellboy engages it in fisticuffs. We will later see a raccoon, snake, and crows that all feel like unfinished effects, not to mention the train itself in this derailment sequence.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man is a smaller-scale and lower-budgeted film than the Hellboy movies that came before it. But it’s considerably bigger-budgeted movie than Sébastien Vaniček’s Infested and the Aussie horror film Sting, both of which brought almost identical-looking giant spiders to life in convincing and skin-crawling detail earlier this year. The shoddy CGI work here should not be excused.

When Hellboy and Bobby Jo stumble across Appalachian witchcraft and join returning resident Tom Ferrell (Yellowstone‘s Jefferson White) on a mission to confront local witches under the spell of the titular Crooked Man, the film starts to pick up. Despite the lackluster CGI, there’s some unsettling practical effects work here, like the soulless skin suit of Cora Fisher (Hannah Margetson), an effect also used in the recent Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Given that Hellboy: The Crooked Man takes place decades before the earlier movies, and only 16 years after his “birth” at the hands of Nazis during WWII, there was an opportunity to showcase a new interpretation of the character, seen in the original comic as an adolescent who has to fully adopt his trademark gruffness. But while Kesy is decent enough in the Hellboy role, and the makeup is still first-rate, the characterization is largely identical to earlier versions played by Perlman and Harbour.

White, meanwhile, is excellent here, and his backwoods yokel character manages to steal the movie away from Kesy’s Hellboy, who seems to disappear into background while offering limited observations in-between cigarette drags. There’s a subplot involving Hellboy’s burning-in-Hell mother (Carola Colombo), which might have had more impact if the character was better defined, but only serves to muddle his motivation.

There’s a lot of meandering around in the forest to get through here, but Hellboy: The Crooked Man comes to life in an intense sequence pulled straight from the comic: as the titular demon (played by Martin Bassindale under makeup effects that recall Warwick Davis in the Leprechaun films) and his witches, including the menacing Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara) surround a church led by a blind Reverend Watts (Joseph Marcell), Hellboy and company fight to survive the night.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man was directed by Brian Taylor, who worked alongside Mark Neveldine on efficient low-budget productions like Crank and its sequel before going solo with the Nicolas Cage horror-comedy Mom and Dad. This one is reminiscent of Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, another Taylor-Neveldine production that had some interesting stuff in it but marked a real departure from the first film and Marvel comics.

There’s a genuinely satisfying adaptation of the original Mike Mignola story in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, but it lasts only 40 minutes, and everything else that has been added to pad the runtime only detracts from it. Unsuspecting audiences tuning in might find this a diverting enough supernatural story this Halloween season, but fans of both the comics and earlier movies will inevitably be disappointed by what’s on display here.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man

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Jason Pirodsky

Jason Pirodsky has been writing about the Prague film scene and reviewing films in print and online media since 2005. A member of the Online Film Critics Society, you can also catch his musings on life in Prague at expats.cz and tips on mindfulness sourced from ancient principles at MaArtial.com.

One Response

  1. The Crooked Man was actually a lot closer to the comics style than the previous movies, and Jack Kesy was the best Hellboy yet. These movies should be dark and grim, not colorful superhero action, and the low budget is no reason to penalize it though yes, the CGI spider did not look great. It may not be as good as the Del Toro movies but The Crooked Man was a huge step up over the 2019 movie and I hope we get movie small scale Hellboy movies with Kesy.

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