Hellboy Movie Reboot

[fred25_ca]

There's nothing I want more than a small scale, monster-of-the-week Hellboy movie! You could do it for so little money, comparatively.

I know right? Imagine a gothic town with fog and old castles similar to the atmosphere in the movie The Nun or old Hammer movies. Add in some big practical fx werewolves and a great script (that relies on characters, mysteries and mood rather than cgi and gore) and you have a potential winner. Start small to gain people's trust, especially after discarding two beloved movies.

That's what most Hellboy fans love, the shorter stories. Not the giant spectacles. And Neil Marshall was so perfect for this. Same with David Harbour. Arrgh. :P

[Angilasman]

^ Something like Wolves of St. August or Christmas Underground would make a good basis for a small-scale HB film.

[Joker]

Wow, what a shame. And a mess.

Can't really say I'm surprised. Mildly disappointed, but I'd kept my hopes pretty low after the 1st trailer.

[ckmoak]

Yeah, Billy Idol really kinda forecasted the direction this would go in. Mony, Mony is sort of an ironic song for them to have picked, since it seems like probably this movie will not make much Mony, Mony.

I'll also join the bandwagon for smaller, atmospheric movies. Wolves of St August really should be a film.

[KROENEN]

I know right? Imagine a gothic town with fog and old castles similar to the atmosphere in the movie The Nun or old Hammer movies. Add in some big practical fx werewolves and a great script (that relies on characters, mysteries and mood rather than cgi and gore) and you have a potential winner. Start small to gain people's trust, especially after discarding two beloved movies.

That's what most Hellboy fans love, the shorter stories. Not the giant spectacles. And Neil Marshall was so perfect for this. Same with David Harbour. Arrgh. :P

When they first described it that was kind of what I was expecting; especially given Mike's involvement and his love for Hammer movies. My expectations shifted after seeing the first trailer but I still had faith in Marshall to pull it off. Doomsday, Descent, and Dog Soldiers are all great movies; bloody, violent fun with very little CGI to muck it up. I still plan on seeing it this weekend, but now I am just in it for the visuals and the violence, I am not looking for a good Hellboy adaption, which is a shame considering how much Mike talked it up and how well they nailed his look (and how much I love the universe created in the comics). I can't find any recent interviews with Neil Marshall and didn't see any photos of him during the premier, does not bode well for the movie. Sounds like another shameless Hollywood cash grab.

[fred25_ca]

^ Something like Wolves of St. August or Christmas Underground would make a good basis for a small-scale HB film.

St. August would have been perfect. And Neil Marshall knows his werewolves. And I agree with Kroenen, when they first announced this I also figured they were going in that direction. That first trailer was quite a shock, honestly.

[Tbolt66]

Something tells me Shazam will still be number one this weekend.

[LobsterJohnson]

St. August would have been perfect. And Neil Marshall knows his werewolves. And I agree with Kroenen, when they first announced this I also figured they were going in that direction. That first trailer was quite a shock, honestly.

I just watched Dog Soldiers for the first time last week, and that is a really fun horror flick. It's a shame how this movie apparently turned out, because I would love to see a small-scale Hellboy movie approached kinda like that.

[The Lobster]

in a similar vein, an adaptation of Hellboy in Mexico as a Weird Western would be fun.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weird_West

the mixed messaging of saying it's going to be a smaller film only to go right back to doomsday plots only furthers the rumors of BTS turmoil.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

I've seen it. The critics are, shall we say, not wrong. This was a terrible, terrible movie. I'll have my full review up tomorrow but I can't stress enough how inept, nasty and boring this film is. If you were uset before about Gullermo del Toro not getting to do a third film, wait until you've seen what we got instead.

[middenway]

I've seen it. The critics are, shall we say, not wrong. This was a terrible, terrible movie. I'll have my full review up tomorrow but I can't stress enough how inept, nasty and boring this film is. If you were uset before about Gullermo del Toro not getting to do a third film, wait until you've seen what we got instead.

"Nasty" is an apt description. It's a rather mean-spirited film.

[Ilan Preskovsky]

"Nasty" is an apt description. It's a rather mean-spirited film.

It really is. Who thought that was a good direction for Hellboy, of all things?

[The Lobster]

"Nasty" is an apt description. It's a rather mean-spirited film.

are you planning to write a review at some point?

[middenway]

are you planning to write a review at some point?

No. I didn't enjoy the film and it'd be a draining experience to write about it. Plus, there are plenty of reviews out there already, and I don't think I have anything to say that hasn't already been said.

[Angilasman]

Wrote this on another board:

Yeah, it's bad. Pretty terrible, really. Some spoilers included, but I'll keep it vague.

The story is a hodgepodge a various Hellboy comics, and the movie is at its best in the first half when it plays like a series of vignettes of Hellboy having these crazy adventures. I mean, it's still cheap looking and goofy from the start, but for the first half it maintains an enjoyable B-movie feel, like the action movie equivilant of a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. It's once we pass through these few short stories worth of material to enter the main storyline (we're halfway through the movie before we introduce the rest of the main characters) that the film goes from enjoyably bad to just bad. It feels as though the third act of this movie was cut down from something originally twice as long, as we violently ricochet from plot point to action beat with no connective tissue between them and you feel like there was a tremendous amount left on the cutting-room floor, making it feel like a mediocre collage of footage with no oomph or focus behind anything. What's funny about once the movie gets into the plot heavy part of the movie is that despite pulling directly from Mignola's comic it hits pretty much all the same story beats covered in Guillermo del Toro's previous two movies. You'll be amazed at how similar almost all the sequences in the third act are to scenes much more satisfyingly realized in those previous films.

The cast is pretty game, and try their best with the bad material and dialogue given to them. It's easy to imagine a much better movie with pretty much the same cast. McShane as Broom is maybe the most interesting, as he's a great and charismatic actor yet the character has been rewritten to be so thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable so it all cancels out. His main affectation is that he drops f-bombs in every sentence and is pointlessly mean. Those obscenities were maybe intended to be funny (?), but they don't amount to any memorable zingers...

... That's the weird thing about this R-rated business; it seems like an afterthought. All the swearing and gore feel like they were plopped in at the last minute and none have any punch to them. There's no swear words providing awesome moments like Samuel Jackson dialog in Pulp Fiction, and there's no gore that legitimately surprises and terrifies like the eye-gouging in Fulci's Zombie (to bring up two effective examples). The dirty bits are totally perfunctory and this could easily be a PG-13 movie without losing anything of value.

Oh, it's very cheap. Some of the worst CGI you will see this decade, and a lot of the practical effects are bad, too. At several points you see Hellboy's horns wobble! There are a few well realized practical effects and neat creature designs in there, though.

The Baba Yaga, an incredible character from the comic based on Russian folklore, is reduced to a latexy Goosebumps villain. Lobster Johnson, another great character here played by great actor, is reduced to a pointless cameo who will no doubt completely flummox general audiences.

In short; it's a total systems failure of a movie. It's vastly inferior to Guillermo del Toro's movies, and it falls so woefully short of the comic books on which it's directly based that fans of neither will have much to like.