HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN ★★ (MA15+) 99 minutes The heroic comic book monster Hellboy first hit the screen in 2004 when Mexican director Guillermo del Toro took him up, impressed by his cynical attitude to authority and ready talent for the laconic putdown. The result was a success – a self-aware salute to the old-fashioned horror movie – and del Toro produced an equally popular sequel. It’s hard to raise a laugh in Hellboy: The Crooked Man, starring Jack Kesy as Hellboy and Adeline Rudolph as Bobbie Jo Song.
That was it until 2019, when Hellboy returned with a different lead actor and director, only to meet with complete indifference. The film was an unequivocal flop. Nonetheless, he’s back again in Hellboy: The Crooked Man , a backwoods ghost story that has him battling an army of disinterred corpses commanded by the devil.
It’s a story drawn directly from one of the comic books, which may please the fans, but the doom-struck Appalachian setting and hyperactive cast of occult shape-shifters takes us a long way from del Toro’s slick vision of the Hellboy world. Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), his colleague from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, are on a train when the rare spider they are transporting to a research laboratory escapes its box, executes a radical growth spurt and derails the train, depositing them in the woods. Friendly faces are rare in this corner of the country, but they manage to hook up with Tom Ferrel.