[Ad - Sponsored by INTOTHEAM] Film Brain investigates the third incarnation of the big red comic book superhero, who has been subject to severe budget cuts that suggests this film is more for holding onto the rights.
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00:00This video is sponsored by Into the AM.
00:03Hello and welcome to Projector, and on this episode, Jack Keesey's Hellboy comes face to face with the Crooked Man.
00:10["Crooked Man"]
00:26In 1959, Hellboy and BPRD agent Bobby Joe Song, played by Jack Keesey and Adeline Rudolph respectively,
00:33survive when their train crashes in rural Appalachia.
00:36They find themselves in a community ruled over by witches and superstition,
00:39with the worst of all being the Crooked Man, played by Martin Bassendale, who collects souls for the devil.
00:45Teaming up with ex-soldier Tom Farrell, played by Jefferson White, and witch Cora Fisher, played by Hannah Margretson,
00:51Hellboy must investigate and confront the Crooked Man, if they hope to escape.
00:57Twenty years ago, the Dark Horse superhero character Hellboy burst onto the screen with Guillermo del Toro's film.
01:03Yes, I know, I'm ripping that band-aid off early. It makes me feel ancient to know that's two decades old at this point.
01:09That was then of course followed by its sequel, The Golden Army, in 2008, and there was also two animated spin-off films as well.
01:16It was a perfect project for del Toro, who was a fan of the comics, and especially for his regular collaborator Ron Perlman,
01:22who was pitch-perfect casting to playing the cigar-chomping Big Red Demon.
01:27When you think of Hellboy, you likely think of Ron Perlman as the character.
01:31But while del Toro's Hellboy films are well-liked and have a huge cult following, they were never big box office successes.
01:38The two live-action films were even made by two different film studios.
01:42So because of that, attempts at making a third film with del Toro and Perlman eventually collapsed,
01:47despite the fact that fans, to this day, still wish for them to make a third film together.
01:52But the rights to the character eventually went to Millennium Media, who are best known for making The Expendables,
01:58and they rebooted the character back in 2019.
02:01The 2019 film was a hugely troubled production, with director Neil Marshall clashing with the producers,
02:08and that is very visible on screen, and I thought that was one of the worst films of the year.
02:13I thought it was a really bloody mess, in all honesty.
02:16Unsurprisingly, for a hard-R reboot no one was really asking for, to a character that already had a spotty box office track record,
02:23the 2019 film was a critical and commercial flop, despite being intended to launch a new franchise,
02:29that even ended on sequel bait, that of course never happened.
02:33Now, five years later, Millennium have rebooted the character again with The Crooked Man,
02:38based directly on the story of the same name from the comics.
02:41Hellboy creator Mike Mignola is deeply involved with this film, even co-adapting his work for the screen,
02:47and he has expressed some feelings in interviews that the del Toro films didn't quite get the tone of the comics right.
02:53The new film is directed and co-written by Brian Taylor, who directed Mom and Dad,
02:58but is best known for collaborating with Mark Nevildine on the Crank films,
03:02as well as the second Ghost Rider movie, Spirit of Vengeance, and they also co-wrote the notorious flop Jonah Hex.
03:08So, not exactly the best of track records when it comes to comic book adaptations.
03:13And The Crooked Man hasn't been so much released as limped out.
03:17Publicity for the film has been scant, and the first that many people even heard of it was when the teaser trailer leaked online,
03:24and many people didn't have a very high opinion of that trailer.
03:28It has been gradually released across several territories theatrically over the last several months,
03:33including here in the UK, but in America, the distributor, Ketchup Entertainment,
03:38instead decided to give it a straight-to-VOD burial after they initially intended to release it in cinemas.
03:44And I think this suggests that someone at Ketchup did actually sit down and watch it,
03:49because The Crooked Man is by far the least of the Hellboy films,
03:54and yes, that even includes the 2019 one.
03:58By the way, if you like the shirt that I've been wearing throughout this review, it's another design from Into The AM,
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04:35The signs are bad very early on in The Crooked Man.
04:38The film begins with the closest thing it has to a big special effects sequence,
04:42where Hellboy has to fight this spider that they're transporting by train,
04:46which then suddenly grows to massive size and causes the train to derail.
04:50And the effects in this sequence are very poor.
04:53As usual for Millennium, the film is shot in Bulgaria, which means that if you look at the end credits,
04:58almost all the crew's names end in A or V, quite amusingly.
05:02But they also use their own in-house visual effects company, World Wide Effects.
05:07So if you've ever watched something like The Expendables and wondered why the CGI in them
05:11looks so consistently iffy, yeah, that would be the reason why.
05:16And looking at The Crooked Man, it really feels like Millennium haven't come that far
05:21from their New Image days when they were making things like Shark Attack 3.
05:25The spider looks like it's come out of a PlayStation 2 game in particular,
05:29with noticeably jerky animation in several shots.
05:33And the shot of the train, especially when it's crashing down through the trees,
05:37really look especially bad. They look very low-res and primitive.
05:42Moreover, the film barely even introduces Hellboy in its opening stages,
05:46which is perhaps an understandable choice given he's already had two previous film adaptations.
05:51But it also assumes the audience is already familiar with the character because they saw those films,
05:57if they don't already read the comic books.
06:00And I don't think the character is really as popular in the same way as Spider-Man, Batman or Superman
06:05to get away with this, because those characters, anyone could tell you their origin story.
06:11Whereas here, you need to make it clearly defined from the jump
06:14that this is a separate version of the character from the previous films.
06:18So if you're a newcomer, this is not exactly a great place to jump on board,
06:21although I will say that it does its own version of Hellboy's origin story,
06:25conveyed largely through dialogue.
06:28Hellboy was found in a church in this iteration, much like he was in the comics,
06:32and there's also sequences where the character confronts his birth mother in the afterlife.
06:37And aside from a couple of mentions that he was on Life magazine,
06:40that's really all the details that you get.
06:43And also, no one seems to treat Hellboy particularly in a special way.
06:48No one seems surprised or startled to see a big red demon in their midst for the most part.
06:54It really takes away from the mystique or the stature of the character.
06:58He's just some random dude in this story.
07:01I think that Jack Kesey is probably the weakest actor to play the character to date,
07:05although he's clearly doing the best he can with the material and the makeup that he's in.
07:10Perlman's version of Hellboy leaves some very big horns to fill.
07:13He effectively defined the character,
07:16and I wasn't a big fan of David Harbour's take,
07:19who I personally felt got a bit swamped in his own makeup a lot of the time.
07:24Kesey's is also hampered by his makeup, but in a different way,
07:28in that it looks rather underwhelming, to be honest.
07:31He looks like a really good cosplayer,
07:34but he also doesn't have a big charismatic presence,
07:37and that's not just because of the writing. That is a performance issue.
07:40He doesn't really stand out or bring all that much to the character.
07:45I think that's partly because the film does focus on Hellboy less,
07:49and he even feels like a side player within his own movie a lot of the time.
07:53But Kesey just doesn't make the character feel like his own.
07:56When I was watching his performance,
07:58it felt like he was taking a lot of cues from Ron Perlman's performance,
08:02which is a good place to start,
08:04especially because that's the version that most people will be familiar with,
08:08but it feels more like an impression.
08:10It feels more like he's trying to do what Perlman would have done in this performance,
08:15which would have provided a bit of continuity
08:18if it was meant to be connected with the Del Toro films, which it isn't.
08:22But that lack of explanation or backstory also applies to Bobby Joe,
08:26who is a new character that was created directly for the film,
08:30a rookie agent that's more comfortable behind a desk than she is out in the field.
08:34The character, to me, reminded me a lot of Rupert Evans' Myers from the 2004 film,
08:40largely there to send and receive exposition,
08:43and a character that Del Toro hated so much
08:45that he had him sent off to Antarctica in the second film.
08:49But Bobby Joe is also meant to be Hellboy's love interest,
08:52which came as a deep surprise to me when I was watching this,
08:55because Hellboy spends so much of the early going
08:58being passive-aggressive and condescending to her,
09:01saying things like,
09:04and making fun of the fact that she's inexperienced,
09:06and then we're suddenly being told that he's actually being protective towards her
09:10and trying to keep her out of danger
09:12because he has feelings for her that he can't express.
09:15It's like she's been written two different ways in either half of the film.
09:20But Joe is also the only other BPRD agent in the film.
09:24There's a government agent on the train, but he's killed off immediately,
09:28so don't expect any appearance from the likes of, say, Abe Sapien or anyone like that,
09:33mostly because the budget doesn't allow for it.
09:36Now, you might be familiar with the term
09:39which are works made expressly for the purpose of holding onto rights,
09:42usually made very cheaply.
09:44It actually originated from comic books, but you do sometimes see it with films.
09:49Think notoriously of the Corman Fantastic Four that was never released,
09:53or those Weinstein Hellraiser and Children of the Corn sequels,
09:56or whenever Warren Beatty sits down as Dick Tracy to have a Laird Moulton interview.
10:01I was not the only one who felt that way about The Crooked Man
10:04from that very first teaser or the indifferent approach to its release.
10:09And now that I've seen the film, I can confirm that it played to me
10:13and felt like an Ashkan film.
10:16It looks extremely cheap from start to finish.
10:19The budget for The Crooked Man is reportedly $20 million,
10:22which is just under half of the 2019 film,
10:25which itself would be the smallest for a Hellboy live-action movie.
10:29But when I was watching it, it actually felt like it cost half that, if not less.
10:35There's minimal characters in the movie.
10:38There's only about nine or so created actors and relatively few locations.
10:43In fact, much of it is just wandering around in the woods,
10:46which is the cheapest location you can film in a lot of the time.
10:51Of the money they did have, the filmmakers clearly spent it wisely
10:54by putting it into practical effects,
10:56which look way better than whenever they have to resort to CGI.
11:00The Crooked Man in particular looks very good
11:02whenever he actually boils to show up in his own movie.
11:05But there's also one merrible standout sequence, in my opinion,
11:08where Korra, who is shapeshifted into a raccoon,
11:12climbs back into the skin of a human body.
11:15It's really got this kinetic gross-out energy.
11:18The raccoon climbs back into this lifeless body,
11:22just draped over a bed like a coat.
11:25It's very, very stark,
11:27and it's actually a sign of what this film could have been
11:30if it had more money behind it.
11:32Now, in theory, there's nothing wrong with a smaller-scale Hellboy film
11:36that's closer to something in the comics.
11:38You think of something like a procedural,
11:40almost like a Monster of the Week X-Files,
11:42that sounds like fun.
11:44Have Hellboy do some actual investigating.
11:47We haven't seen a lot of that in the previous Hellboy films.
11:50Likewise, in concept,
11:52the idea of Hellboy just dropping into something like an Evil Dead movie
11:56sounds great.
11:57Going for more of a horror vibe
11:59would again set it apart from the previous adaptations.
12:02But the execution is limp and compromised.
12:05They just clearly didn't have enough money to do this justice.
12:10The Crooked Man's production values resemble a fan film
12:13than something that actually paid to see money in a cinema.
12:16And if it was a fan film,
12:18you'd be so much more forgiving of its limitations
12:20because it would be someone's passion project,
12:22something they did on their own dime
12:24with their own money with their friends,
12:26but not something that has come out from a semi-major studio like Millennium,
12:31who are now looking like late-period canon films
12:34on the evidence of this.
12:35Taylor tries to compensate for the lack of budget
12:38by bathing the film in darkness to try and hide it,
12:41but that means that large chunks of the film are so murky
12:44that it's hard to even see what's happening at times.
12:47It's so dim that there were several points in the film
12:51where you can't see the actors' faces in close-ups,
12:54and sometimes that's because they're backlit in dark rooms,
12:57especially in the final section of the movie
12:59where they're wandering around this house
13:01and there's light pouring in from the windows,
13:04but it's so behind them that they're just blotting out the faces,
13:08which is a bit of a problem for a movie
13:10that already has a character with a dark red face.
13:13At least Del Toro's stylised lighting
13:16meant that you could always see what was happening,
13:19even in dimly lit scenes.
13:21However, The Crooked Man is also sloppily put together
13:23in ways that have nothing to do with its budget, like editing.
13:27I have never in my life seen a film that has had so many fade-to-blacks in it.
13:32I joke they got the film ready for commercial breaks on television,
13:36they've got the ad space directly inserted into the movie,
13:39but there's actually more than that.
13:42For the whole first half of the film, it feels like,
13:45almost every sequence, sometimes every scene in some cases,
13:49has a cut or a fade-to-black at the end of it,
13:52and it's so weird and distracting because they're not even necessary.
13:56These scenes would cut together fine and they'd flow,
14:00and the fact that they don't makes it feel even more disjointed
14:03because it feels like it's been assembled out of multiple different parts.
14:07And then the film starts doing chapters midway through,
14:10which is one of my least favourite modern movie things,
14:13although only half-heartedly and only doing it twice,
14:17which makes you wonder why they even bother to do that either.
14:20The visuals and the editing don't help with a movie
14:22that already has problems with coherency in its script.
14:25I was genuinely struggling at points to follow why things were even happening sometimes,
14:30sometimes because of the way the film looked,
14:33and other times because the script does such a bad job of explaining itself
14:37or what is even happening on screen half the time.
14:40To its credit, the script is at times so close and so faithful to its source material
14:44that it's actually using direct quotes of the dialogue,
14:48but lines like,
14:49Okay, Snake, let's rattle!
14:51They might sound badass on the page in a speech bubble,
14:54but they sound goofy coming out of an actual person.
14:57But it also just doesn't do a good job of making the story intelligible
15:00for those that haven't read the comic story it was based on,
15:03i.e. someone like me in the audience.
15:06If you're a fan of the source material,
15:08it might be a little bit more decipherable,
15:11but it still feels like elements were dropped or condensed massively
15:15because they had to really, really pinch in order to make the budget of the movie.
15:20Really, the main character of the film isn't even Hellboy,
15:23it's Tom, who has a cursed lucky bone that is massively important.
15:27That's thanks to trickery from a witch as a boy
15:30that meant that he had an encounter with the Crooked Man at a young age.
15:34But even this prop looks weak, despite it being a key point of the movie.
15:39The bone is from the body of a cat, you see,
15:42and so it's so small and so tiny
15:45that it often looks like it was plucked from the bottom of a KFC bargain bucket.
15:49It's literally like this tiny hair-like bone that occasionally glows at the end of it.
15:55Not exactly a great prop to put at the centre of your movie.
15:59Tom also spends much of the film carrying the corpse of his father to bury,
16:03although you'd actually be mistaken a lot of the time for thinking it was a sleeping bag
16:07because it's draped over his shoulder with clearly no weight to it whatsoever.
16:12Yeah, I did hear that dead people are usually quite heavy a lot of the time.
16:16That brings us to the one other sequence of note, which is a lengthy showdown set in a church.
16:21In fact, so much of the film takes place in this one location
16:24that I think about a third of the running time takes place in this church.
16:27But that's when the Crooked Man actually shows up to summon the dead to attack our heroes,
16:32and the film seems to acknowledge its debt to John Carpenter,
16:35specifically Assault on Precinct 13,
16:37by having the score suddenly start channelling the theme to The Thing,
16:40like duh-duh, duh-duh, duh-duh.
16:44Yeah, I could be watching much better movies instead.
16:47Or maybe this sequence is just notable for the fact that Joseph Marcel pops up
16:50as a blind priest in this segment,
16:53probably best known for playing Joffrey the butler in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
16:57So if you ever want to see Joffrey call someone a motherfucker,
17:00this is the movie for you.
17:02But again, it's hindered by very busy camerawork and rapid cutting in dim lighting
17:07that makes it especially hard to see in the franticness of it all.
17:11And nor is the film especially scary,
17:13apart from turning the volume way up for its jump scares,
17:17especially as it starts limping towards an underwhelming conclusion.
17:21In fact, the sound design is so unbalanced and those jump scares are so obnoxious
17:25that I actually feel like it might have been left unfinished.
17:28What the film is lacking most of all, though, is a sense of joy.
17:32Del Toro clearly had fun with all the phantasmagoria,
17:35even Marshall to a certain extent,
17:37but The Crooked Man is just relentlessly grey visually
17:41and just straight-up dull from end to end.
17:44It isn't even so bad it's good, I just found this tedious to sit through.
17:49Only die-hard fans of Hellboy need to bother with The Crooked Man.
17:53It, at best, feels like a stopgap until they do another big reboot in a few years' time
17:58and this is mostly there just to hold onto the rights until that point.
18:02Now, there is effort put into a few areas, but the massive limitations are extremely obvious
18:08and the production values are well below par for a theatrical release.
18:12There are films made for streaming on even less money that look far superior.
18:16Even something like Megan Fox's Subservience, which was also made by Millennium,
18:21that looks ten times more polished than this.
18:24Hell, the 2019 film was also slicker and that had some terrible CGI shots in it at points.
18:31The character deserves far better treatment
18:34and it's bad enough that I think it usurps Madam Web as the worst comic book film of the year
18:39because at least you can get some ironic entertainment value out of that.
18:43This, at best, feels perfunctory.
18:46Stick to the Del Toro films, send this back to Hell.
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19:11Until next time, I'm Matthew Buck, fading out.