By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Superhero movies aren’t as big as they once were, with Marvel’s latest, Captain America: Brave New World struggling to surpass the box office of Antman and The Wasp: Quantumania, but even then, the fall of Hellboy, from big-budget Guillermo del Toro production to an afterthought tossed onto Hulu, is astonishing. Yet, Hellboy: The Crooked Man, the fourth film in the series, starring the third actor, Jack Kesy, to portray the demonic good guy, debuted as the Number One film on Hulu. It’s the most direct adaptation of Mike Mignola’s comic yet, and even a low-budget with cheap effects can’t keep a good story down.
A Different Type Of Demon
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is not a globe-trotting adventure like the other films starring Ron Perlman and David Harbour, instead, it’s set in the forests of Appalachia in a small town filled with witches and haunted by a dark presence. Hellboy and rookie B.P.R.D. agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph), a character not found in the original graphic novel, get wrapped up with Tom (Jefferson White) a soldier coming home to confront the The Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale) and reconcile with his witchy ex-girlfriend. Tom explains that the demonic entity provides power for a steep price, and though this is a younger version of the hero since the film is set in 1959, the B.P.R.D. agent knows a thing or two about contracts with demons.
The local coven of witches, disciples of The Crooked Man, get involved, while Reverend Nathaniel Watts (Joseph Marcell) lends his blessings to the good guys. As with every good Hellboy story, The Crooked Man culminates in a final battle in a decaying, gothic structure as threats both real and imagined engulf the heroes. It’s a satisfying, fairly comic-accurate story that has delighted most of the fans of the original series, but it is by no means perfect.
No Budget, No Problem
Right from the opening scene onboard a train, you can tell that Hellboy: The Crooked Man will not be nearly as visually interesting as del Toro’s two films. Everything looks washed out and if you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was a mid-2000’s SyFy original movie. To say that the film is carried by the strength of the dialogue, parts of which are word-for-word from Mignola’s comic, is an understatement, and that’s before The Crooked Man himself makes an appearance.
Martin Bassindale plays the monster of folklore with the right amount of creepiness, accented by the sounds of bones cracking and readjusting whenever he moves, but it’s hard not to imagine how much better he would have looked with anything resembling a budget behind the film. Shot on the cheap by director Brian Taylor (director of Crank, Gamer, and creator of the bonkers detective series, Happy), Hellboy: The Crooked Man has the look and feel of a fan film, in the best way possible, and was clearly a labor of love for the source material and not an attempt at another blockbuster. It was destined to be a streaming hit, and thankfully for fans of the B.P.R.D., that’s exactly what it is today.
Not only is Hellboy: The Crooked Man proof that a scaled-back superhero film can work if expectations are kept in check, it’s also a love letter to the off-beat supernatural gothic comic that never quite hit the mainstream. The film has more in common with Evil Dead than it does Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, but thanks to everyone giving it their all, it’s one of Hulu’s best movies, and if the streaming numbers impress the right people, there’s a chance it could even relaunch the dormant franchise.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man is now streaming on Hulu.
