I've always loved Mike Mignola's iconic comic book about the bright red Hellboy and his atmospheric, dark adventures as the US government's top demon-slayer. I was never particularly sold on Guillermo del Toro's beloved adaptations for the simple reason that I felt (and still feel) that he made far too many changes, especially aesthetically, to call his films Hellboy. Mignola's fantastic drawing style and that Lovecraftian design was thrown out in del Toro's two films and replaced by Pan's Labyrinth prosthetics and far too bright colours. However, I'm willing to let all that rest. I'm willing to let del Toro's aesthetic pass as long as I don't have to see any more Hellboy movies of the quality that the comic book licence has delivered in recent years.
First we got the absurdly bad film by Neil Marshall in 2019 and now it's time to face the music again. The screenwriter behind Cranked (that's where the titles recognisable from his extremely pancake-thin track record stop, by the way) has directed what is essentially an indie film. It was originally intended that Mignola and director Brian Taylor would produce/finish The Crooked Man for around $10 million, but the price tag shot up to double that before it was completely finished. $20 million... is no small amount of money but considering that the 2019 version cost $50 million and that del Toro's second film (The Golden Army) cost around $85 million to make - The Crooked Man is a real low-budget story, in comparison.
And it shows.
The first thing you see in frame one is Hellboy, this time portrayed by Jack Kesy, who I understand has worked more as a prop than anything else in films like Baywatch and the Tom Clancy film Without Remorse. I've seen them both but have no recollection of ever noticing Kesy, which sadly relegates him to "extra" status for me. Well, more or less. Now, however, he is Hellboy and the make-up that turned him into Mignola's Son of the Fallen One is the single worst thing I've ever seen in a feature film in my life. Hellboy looks like he was moulded from Play-Doh. It's so badly done that in most of the scenes it becomes a parody as Kesy's face doesn't move (at all) but also looks as if you just smeared some clay, brushed it with red paint and glued rubber horns to it that you bought from a costume shop.
The rest of the film looks about as lavish. $20 million is a very low budget in Hollywood today, but this film looks like it cost a fraction of that. As a contrasting example, the brilliant Leigh Whannell put together Upgrade (2018) for about $3 million and looks for the most part like any hundred-million-dollar production, something that can absolutely never be said about The Crooked Man. The photography is dreadful. The lighting is terrible. The costumes? Pitiful. The editing is sloppy, the computer effects are terrible, and as a horror film, Taylor has a lot of trouble finding the right tone and shock effect. It's drawn out, never creepy, just dreary and sleepy.
The Crooked Man is a great comic book. I remember how much I liked the horror feel when it was first released and appreciated the demon who turns the women in the forest into witches. The story centres on a small, lonely clearing deep in the north-western Appalachian Mountains and how 1959's Hellboy accidentally ends up there and runs into trouble. The comic book is evocative, dark, violent and interesting while the film is ugly, dull, sleepy with lousy acting and deplorably ugly effects. As a Hellboy fan, I think it's a great shame that the character is abused in this way, because he could be the toughest bastard in the film world and the films should be good considering the basic material.