HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN (2024)

Studio:   Ketchup Entertainment
Director: Brian Taylor
Writer:   Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola, Brian Taylor
Producer: Mike Richardson, Jeffrey Greenstein, Yariv Lerner, Jonathan Yunger, Les Weldon, Robert Van Norden, Sam Schulte
Stars:    Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Leah McNamara, Hannah Margetson, Martin Bassindale, Joseph Marcell

Review Score:

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Summary:

In 1959, Hellboy confronts a conspiracy of witches connected to an emissary of the devil deep in the Appalachian Mountains.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

In 1959, Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense special agents Hellboy, Dennis Gates, and Bobbie Jo Song, who is doing field work for the first time, transport a large demonic spider by train through Appalachia. Suddenly triggered by an unknown evil in the area, the spider breaks free from its crate, kills Dennis, and causes chaos that crashes the train car in the woods. Following a fight with Hellboy, the spider shrinks to normal size and disappears into a grate in the forest floor.

Hellboy and Jo continue on to a dilapidated cabin where they find a family nursing a catatonic boy believed to have been entranced by a witch. Having just returned to the region for the first time in years, local man Tom Ferrell joins everyone at the house. After finding a witch ball that confirms the boy's hex, Tom decides to question nearby witch Cora Fisher since they used to be sweethearts. Hellboy and Jo accompany him.

Upon reaching Cora's cabin, Hellboy, Tom, and Jo find Cora's body is just a sack of flesh, indicating her spirit is currently elsewhere. While waiting for Cora to return, Tom tells Hellboy and Jo how, in his youth, he was under the influence of another witch, Effie Kolb. Tom followed Effie's instructions to clean a cat skeleton, and whatever bone he was holding when the devil appeared would be Tom's "lucky bone." Tom soon met "The Crooked Man," an undead miser who collects souls for the devil that he exchanges for coins. Tom refused to use the bone's magic and even tried ridding himself of it, but it continually appeared in his life and seemingly saved him from dying during World War II.

Cora returns to her body. Cora cryptically warns that "they" are coming for her soul.

Effie Kolb arrives at Cora's cabin on horseback to taunt Tom. Hellboy warns that if Effie's master wants Tom to pay his devilish debt, The Crooked Man will have to go through Hellboy. Effie cackles and floats away after revealing her horse was actually Tom's elderly father transformed and forced into extreme physical exertion. Tom's father dies.

Despite the danger of The Crooked Man waiting for him there, Tom sets off for Reverend Watts's remote church to bury his father. Hellboy, Jo, and Cora join him. Along the way, Jo presses Cora for information about spells due to her passionate interest in gaining the ability to wield magic.

Cora suddenly begins levitating. A snake emerges from between Cora's legs and bites her. Hellboy fights the snake, but it bites him until he crushes its head. Dazed by the supernatural venom, Hellboy has a vision of his mother, Sarah Hughes, suffering eternal torment for her sins before a massive bird burns her with flames as she's forced to birth Hellboy.

Hellboy returns to reality. Tom tries to revive Cora, but she disappears into the dirt.

Hellboy, Tom, and Jo arrive at the church. Reverend Watts, who is blind, reveals Cora told him they would be coming, because although the devil claimed her body, he didn't claim her soul.

Even though it is still daytime, darkness falls as several witches surround the church. Effie coaxes Tom outside for a confrontation with The Crooked Man, who tells Tom to turn over his lucky bone. Tom offers to hand over the bone to prevent anyone else from dying, but Hellboy stops him under suspicion of The Crooked Man having too strong of a desire for the object.

The Crooked Man taunts Hellboy about his mother. Hellboy tries to shoot The Crooked Man, but insects swarm Hellboy. The Crooked Man uses supernatural powers to fire iron fence posts into Hellboy's body. Everyone retreats back inside the church.

The Crooked Man offers to restore Reverend Watts's youth and eyesight if he turns over the bone. Watts resists The Crooked Man's tempting visions and refuses.

The Crooked Man resurrects corpses from the cemetery outside to attack everyone in the church. Hellboy begins dispatching the ghouls, but the church becomes overrun. Watts and Tom use the lucky bone to draw a cross on the shovel used to bury bodies outside. Hellboy then swings the shovel to vanquish the ghouls.

Hellboy instructs Jo to stay behind with Watts while he and Tom venture on to The Crooked Man's home in a wrecked region known as "The Hurricane." After they become separated in The Crooked Man's house, Tom confronts Effie, but repels her with the bone. Meanwhile, Hellboy confronts a haunting vision of his mother where he is tricked into turning his gun on himself.

At the same time, Jo recalls Tom saying the surrounding hills are like a living thing and the underground mines are its circulatory system. Accompanied by Reverend Watts, Jo ventures into the mines in hopes of using her first spell to disrupt The Crooked Man's power source. Underground, a murder of crows pecks out Watts's eyes.

Jo confronts the demon spider that escaped earlier. Focusing on a traumatic childhood memory involving her dying mother, Jo recites an incantation to break The Crooked Man's magic, which returns the spider to normal size, allowing her to recapture it.

Jo's hex simultaneously shakes Hellboy out of his vision, preventing him from inadvertently shooting himself. After they regroup, Hellboy and Tom confront The Crooked Man. Tom throws a witch ball into The Crooked Man's mouth to stop his assault against Hellboy. Hellboy resumes his own assault and uses his gun to blow apart The Crooked Man's head.

As they exit the house, Hellboy tells Tom he thinks the lucky bone is merely a cat bone and the power was in Tom all along. The two of them come across a cowering Effie Kolb, now in her true form as an aged hag. Tom and Hellboy use the bridle she put on Tom's father to transform Effie into a white horse.

Hellboy returns to the church to help Jo recover. Hellboy and Jo leave together, find a phone, and summon a BPRD helicopter to rescue them.

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Review:

"Hellboy: The Crooked Man" may not be the movie many Hellboy film fans want. Guillermo del Toro devotees in particular still hope for a third installment to cap off his unfinished trilogy with Ron Perlman, even though that sailed ship seemingly has little chance of ever finding its way back to port. As long as that wish remains ungranted, anything else automatically begins behind the proverbial eight-ball.

Who did want "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" made into a movie? The character's creator, Mike Mignola. In a September 2024 interview with The A.V. Club, the comics industry veteran said, "...this time they got it right, at least from the creative perspective." Mignola's words come seasoned with a grain of salt since he cowrote the screenplay and has a vested interest in the project's success as an executive producer. But he added, "I've never seen something that is that close to my work." Even if film fans had become accustomed to a different interpretation of Hellboy, "The Crooked Man" promised to be the most accurate version yet of Mignola's original vision.

Two days after publishing that interview, The A.V. Club dampened expectations with the loaded headline: "'Hellboy: The Crooked Man' banished to VOD release." Not quite the deafening death knell it used to be in DVD's heyday, a DTV debut in the United States nevertheless stuffed extra baggage into the movie's overhead bins. The article's text backtracked a bit, although words like "banished" followed later by "low-budget" and "stripped-down approach" weren't doing anybody any favors. Neither were negative comments from those who'd seen the movie in UK cinemas and were writing off "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" as a "cheap" disappointment that looked "like a fan film."

A few of those terms have some truth to them. Made for much less money and without the big studio backing "Hellboy" 2004 and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" had, "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" replaces celebrity names with lesser-known actors and swaps FX-heavy spectacles for grounded drama, among other reductions that land the movie on a lower level than its predecessors.

Oddly though, there's a comforting nostalgia that comes with seeing Hellboy sink deeper into a B-movie basement. Contemporary audiences are less likely to have this affinity, yet "Hellboy: The Crooked Man's" economical effort pleasantly recalls a time when franchise films continually shrunk in scope as they went on, and fearlessly took strange swings because of new restrictions, as opposed to how Hollywood now chases bigger box office by just pumping more cash into similar sequels.

In the 1990s, we used to get weird follow-up films like "RoboCop 3." Horror series such as "Hellraiser" and "Leprechaun" went from wide theatrical releases to increasingly wilder, annualized installments on VHS. Even Disney got in on the act by churning out straight-to-video sequels including "The Return of Jafar" and "The Lion King II: Simba's Pride," something they'd never do in the 21st century. This habit of cutting corners wore thin then, yet there's a quaint appeal in the concept now, making "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" a throwback not because it's a period piece, but because it's reminiscent of the maverick state of genre cinema back when Blockbuster was big.

Mike Mignola's intention with "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" is to bring Hellboy back to the basics of being an ordinary guy in a beastly body investigating paranormal activity, rather than a superpowered antihero regularly roped into apocalyptic events. Accordingly, "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" becomes a simple, standalone adventure instead of another origin tale or high-stakes saga spanning multiple worlds. The film trusts the viewer to know enough about Hellboy that only a bit of his backstory is included. The fast-moving plot then handles story-related exposition like a hot rock, holding on essential background only as long as is necessary before bouncing back to the current timeline to maintain a tight 90-minute duration.

At the outset, Hellboy and a fellow BPRD agent, Bobbie Jo Song, end up stranded in Appalachia when a demon spider they were tasked with transporting overturns their train car. Hellboy and Jo make their way to a shack full of mountain folk monitoring a bewitched boy. Recently returned to the region after many years away, local man Tom Ferrell joins Hellboy and Jo in tracking the evil that's been upsetting the area.

That investigation leads them to one good witch and one bad witch. The bad witch aligns herself with The Crooked Man, an undead miser who claims souls for the devil that he exchanges for coins. The Crooked Man has unfinished business with Tom, who possesses a "lucky bone" imbued with magic The Crooked Man desperately desires. Combatting the devil's dirty deed-doer puts Hellboy, Jo, and Tom on a supernatural path where they're forced to face resurrected ghouls, a coven of backwoods witches, and other ancient evils lurking in the forest's haunted hills.

If there's one criticism of "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" that's nigh impossible to argue against, it's that the title attraction's role is so curiously diminished, Hellboy essentially operates as support in a movie bearing his name. Part of that has to do with the movie intentionally focusing on the situation and surroundings Hellboy lands in, not on Hellboy himself. The other part has to do with Jack Kesy being the least commanding of the three silver screen Hellboys. Beneath his makeup, Kesy has a babyface that Ron Perlman and David Harbour definitely don't have. When you watch Kesy's Hellboy chain smoke, there's a sense it's his first time inhaling a cigarette, which is one other way where he seems softer, unlike the fiery biker personality we're familiar with. His tamer take on Hellboy takes some getting used to, although he eventually settles in to earn his keep before the movie is over.

It also takes some getting used to "Hellboy: The Crooked Man's" scaled-back styling, yet once you do, the film's unsettling aura of folk horror quietly creeps up on you. Instead of vibrant superhero action, the movie delivers an unexpectedly eerie fright film, which is precisely want Mignola wants, even if Hellboy gets cut down as a character in the process. Whether the viewer wants this too is where audiences split into conflicting camps. Where one side sees a weakened film whose inferior Hellboy seems unrecognizable to them, I see a dark midnight movie that reminds me of a fitting Halloween season rental from when "DTV" didn't automatically equal "disaster." Based on everyone else's unfavorable responses, I appear to be in the minority here, but I wouldn't mind seeing more sequels strip down and dare to go in different creative directions like "Hellboy: The Crooked Man" does.

Review Score: 75

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