Originally released April 2, 2004:

Guillermo del Toro loves things that go bump in the night. The Mexican born writer/director has shown prowess at slimy, spooky creatures with Cronos and 1997’s Mimic. He helmed the 2002 sequel to Blade, which had super vampires whose mouths would open up into four sections with rows of chattering teeth. The man sure loves his movie monsters. del Toro also loved Mike Mignola’s cult comic book Hellboy enough to turn down directing Harry Potter 3 and Blade 3 to ensure he could bring Hellboy to the big screen. Was it worth the sacrifice?

Let me just explain to you the villains of this movie as an example of how ridiculously stupid Hellboy is. The villains are … Nazis. Yes, the tried and true villains everyone can hate – Nazis. But these ain’t yo’ daddy’s Nazis; they’re immortal and led by zombie Rasputin (yes, the Rasputin). They all wish to puncture a hole into another dimension. What’s in this alternate dimension? Why nothing except for a giant floating spaceship that houses, I kid you not, the Seven Gods of Chaos, which all happen to be gigantic space squids. Why would anyone create a universe that has nothing but the imprisoned gods of evil? That seems awfully precarious. How exactly are giant squids going to take over the industrialized, nuclear-age world? Shoot ink at everyone? Sorry, space ink?

Let me not forget a Nazi assassin and his handy dandy arm-length blades. This assassin is also 100 years old and his body is filled entirely with sand. He winds himself up like a big clock. But if his body is filled completely with sand how can the clock gears work inside? You see what the normal audience member has to deal with? Plus these are just the villains, there’s a whole plot left to toil over as well.

The story revolves around a hulking, red demon named Hellboy (veteran character actor Ron Perlman). Hellboy escaped the space squid dimension in the 1940s when the Nazis unsuccessfully tried to open a dimensional hole large enough for your everyday on-the-go space squid. Now, Hellboy is an elite soldier for the government’s Bureau of Paranormal Research. He fights the creepy crawlies. He has to deal with a wide-eyed rookie, the watch of his “father” (John Hurt) and an attempt to rekindle a romance with a mentally troubled fire starter (Selma Blair). Oh yeah, and all the Nazi/Rasputin/space squid stuff mentioned before.

Perlman is really the only redeeming thing about this movie. The makeup is impressive, and he gives an enjoyably droll performance as a man who fights monsters with the same ho-hum-ness as a plumber reacts to clogged sinks. The rest of the acting runs the gamut of either being too serious (I’m looking at you Blair) or just too over-the-top silly (I’m looking at you, league of villains).

Hellboy is strung together with bizarre inanities, flat one-liners, heavy Catholic imagery, conflicting logic and contradictions, ridiculous villains, painful comic relief, half-baked romance and frustratingly ever-changing plot devices.

Watching Hellboy is like playing tag with a kid that keeps making up new rules as he goes (“You can’t tag me; I have an invisibility shield!”), and after a while you lose any interest. Late in the film, the Nazis will all of a sudden decide not to be immortal, and at a very inopportune time. Why? How? I don’t know. Hellboy also gets sudden new powers for some reason. Like he can bring people back to life by whispering otherworldly threats in their ears. For some reason nobody’s clothes burn when they’re set on fire.

Not only does Hellboy frustrate by changing the rules of its world arbitrarily, it will also frustrate out of sheer uninhibited stupidity. How come characters can’t hear or see a pendulum the size of the Chrysler building? How come during a vision of the apocalypse we see a newspaper that actually had the time and staff, during the Apocalypse, to print an issue that reads, “APOCALYPSE”? Why doesn’t Blair use her pyro superpowers immediately to vanquish all the H.P. Lovecraft creatures instead of letting Hellboy foolishly wrestle with them all? The gaping holes in Hellboy are large enough to squeeze a gigantic space squid through.

All this frustration and insanity might have been moot if the action sequences were somewhat thrilling. Sadly, they are not. del Toro’s action sequences seldom matter. There’s such little consequence of what’s going on that the action becomes stiff and lifeless. The first time we see Hellboy chase a creature through city streets it’s a fun experience, but soon the novelty wears off. The overuse of CGI wears down the audience, and after the third or fourth time we watch Hellboy battle the same monster, the audience is ready to go to sleep. There’s little entertainment in the film’s action sequences but just as much frustration and stupidity.

I have never watched a film that induced more eye rolls, shoulder shrugs, raised eyebrows, pained and confused glances and mutters of, “What the hell (boy)?” Comic book aficionados may enjoy the fruits of Hellboy but general audiences will simply shrug. I’m amazed that the majority of film critics seem to think positively about this movie. Maybe I’m the last sane person in an insane world but Hellboy is one of the worst films of the year and one of the craziest films you could ever hope to see in a lifetime.

Nate’s Grade: D+

——————————————————

WRITER REFLECTIONS 20 YEARS LATER

When I first saw 2004’s Hellboy, toward the tail end of my undergraduate years that April, I had no real familiarity with the character and went in with my pal, and fellow college newspaper entertainment critic Dan Hille. I went in a blank slate to the grumbling demonic lug created by Mike Mignola. To say I was underwhelmed would be an understatement in my original review. I had an extremely hard time gelling with the world and finding some firm internal logic, and my general astonishment colored every inch of that incredulous review from a snarky 22-year-old soon-to-be college grad. Twenty years later, we have a sequel, reboot, and a series of animated shorts and feature-length films, so the character is much better known today than back in 2004. I also think its occult-heavy, Lovecraftian world-building has also been further established through mainstream horror and science fiction projects. So, in 2024, I’m more familiar with the title character, the cultural connections and background, and especially Guilermo del Toro as a filmmaker, and I’m still left unmoved by this initial pitch to the character and his weird world.

It took del Toro and company years to get this movie made as the big studios lacked faith in the material, in Ron Perlamn as the lead, and in superhero and comic book properties period. This really was its own superhero story with outlandish villains, oversized heroes burdened with secrecy, shame, and guilt, and heavy themes reaching into religion and determinism. The concept of an underground agency of monsters to fight monsters is a good starting point for stories, and Perlman brings the right degree of curmudgeon charm to the outcast character who might become the ultimate hero of the world or its instrument of doom. The iconography of a demon trying to be a good guy provides a fun sense of irony, as well as a natural point of conflict as the wider world would have trouble seeing past the red skin, forked tail, and big curved horns. It makes me think of the gut-punch reveal from Arthur C. Clarke’s novel Childhood’s End where the benevolent aliens look exactly like the common visualization of a hooved and horned demon. The starting point for Hellboy has potential. However, it’s the rest that ultimately lost me.

Secret agencies and hidden conspiracies working behind the scene need to, themselves, be interesting. Think of the Men in Black and their assortment of goodies and agents. With the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), I expect more from the supporting characters and what they can unlock about our understanding of the world and the unknown. There really are only two super-powered supporting players, with Doug Jones playing Abe Sapian, a variation on the Creature from the Black Lagoon gillman, and Selma Blair as a pyrokinetic woman who checks herself into mental asylums to protect others. Both of these characters have possibility and are fellow outcasts like Hellboy, but neither feels sufficiently fleshed out and incorporated into this story. Because of Abe’s scenic limitations of being in water, he serves as more of a taste of “the world world” and narrative device. He’s not even involved in the entire final act of labyrinth misadventures. With Blair’s unstable pyro, her character is relegated to a tormented love interest for Hellboy to save, get jealous, and also save again through even more ludicrous means. For a secret agency, it all feels a little too small.

The biggest side character is John Myers (Rupert Evans, The Man in the High Castle), invented for the movie to be the audience’s entry point into learning more of this strange land of strange creatures. He’s a total bore, and he also doesn’t factor much more into the story than being a living reaction shot. He has one significant moment in the climax, and that’s simply telling Hellboy to remember who he is, ultimately convincing the big man to turn back from his destiny of enabling the apocalypse. Why do we need this character? Can’t another super-powered creature serve this same purpose? Why not Blair’s love interest figure, which would then present more attention on beginning that romantic connection between her and Hellboy? There’s a reason in X-Men that we followed a mutant to learn about other mutants and not some boring human. John Myers isn’t even included in the 2008 sequel, The Golden Army, because by that point he had served his only purpose of introducing us to a new world and being a benign romantic foil.

In a story with literal living Nazis brought to life through the magic of anti-Semitic clockwork, I’m dumbfounded why so much of the movie is watching Hellboy fight these boring lizard creatures with tongue tentacles. I appreciate the emphasis on practical effects and the reality that it’s a bunch of stunt performers in monster suits rather than complete CGI. The movie is another love letter of del Toro’s to his influences. His affection for the monsters and outsiders is apparent in every movie going back to his first, 1993’s Cronos. It’s too bad then that the primary opponent are these rudimentary lizard monsters that feel like the kind of easily disposable pawns you would see heroes fighting in other superhero spectacle. They’re faceless, and the fact they can regenerate and duplicate upon death doesn’t make them more formidable, only makes them more depressing as they can’t be easily rid of. If you’re going to give me giant space squids in an alternate dimension, then give me the giant space squids. If you’re going to give me Nazi zombies led by Rasputin, then give me that crazy mess. Don’t confine these potentially interesting villains to the opening and closing only. I will also say the ending is still a rather sizable letdown as far as how formidable these evil space squid gods might prove in a world of explosive devices and a modern military with a practical blank check for its budget.

Fun fact, at the time of its release, some theaters were so worried about playing a movie with “hell” in the title during Easter weekend, and coming off the ongoing success of The Passion of the Christ that brought in more conservative ticket-buyers, they decided to re-title it “Helloboy” on their theater marquis. I find this absolutely hilarious.

Hellboy has some points of interest, as del Toro was still fine-tuning his brand of fantasy-horror into a more mass-appealing conduit. It’s got terrific makeup effects and some fun ideas, and it’s also certifiably insane. It threw me for a loop back in 2004, and I just couldn’t process this level of hyper absurd elements jumbled together, and it still makes for a bumpy viewing. I enjoyed the 2008 sequel much more, which took more of a dark fantasy bent, and I wonder if I was more accepting of that realm of material than I was for Lovecraftian sci-fi nonsense. del Toro has learned from the Hellboy experience, becoming something of a masterful chameleon. He delivered one of the best kaiju action movies of all time that made me feel like a giddy kid. He created a haunting fairy tale timed to the Spanish Civil War. He created a charming romantic fable where a woman falls in love with a fish and it won an Oscar for Best Picture and he won Best Director. He created one of the most visually impressive stop-motion animated movies of all time that can make me cry like a baby and deservedly won another Oscar. Next up, he’s got another stop-motion animated movie and another creature feature, a remake of Frankenstein. Through his versatility, creative consistency, and inherent ability to find human drama in the most peculiar places, I’ll see any movie that del Toro decides to devote his worthy attention towards. Hellboy though? I’ve seen it twice now, and I think I can leave it at that. I’ll upgrade my earlier ranking but not too higher, Hoo boy is that 2004 review a fun read.

Re-View Grade: C