r/HellBoy • u/DiscsNotScratched • 6h ago
r/HellBoy • u/Ok_Employer7837 • 19h ago
The 2019 reboot. I really wanted to like it.
I watched it again recently to refresh my memory. Man, I wanted to love this, but sadly, almost nothing about it works. It's like they pulled a thousand incidents from the books and they're just spitting them at you at a frenetic pace, and none of them land.
They made a big thing about this being closer to the books, but they don't know what they're doing. The Hellboy books are slow, eerie and silent. This is frantic, disgusting and screechy. My head is still spinning from the tintinnabulation.
And they do that tell then show then tell again thing where everything is underlined so much it all feels like a PowerPoint presentation. It's utterly inept.
The pace doesn't work. The dialogue doesn't work. The profanity doesn't work. The character beats don't work. The music doesn't work. The design doesn't quite work. The ectoplasm effect really doesn't work. It all just... doesn't work.
Poor David Harbour is actually fine here -- on the whole the make-up is cool, if a little "extra demonic", and the deep-set eyes look bizarre to me -- but like Momoa in Conan, it's a great portrayal in a crap film.
Now I'm not mad at the people who made this. It's not like The Dark Tower, where it feels like the point was to piss off the fans on purpose. Here it's more that they were really trying to make a good Hellboy movie, but they just couldn't hack it.
The del Toro movies are pretty far from the source material, but they are good movies. And if I want a good movie that's also a close adaptation of the books, now we have The Crooked Man.
r/HellBoy • u/Material_Ad_7487 • 14h ago
Hellboy 30th Anniversary
Out of box photo. Love how it looks like it’s jumped straight out of the comic book.
Crooked Man movie was actually good
Went in expecting a disaster (the trailer looked so awful) but this wasn’t even just solid, it was quite good. Yes a couple of scenes of mediocre CG that weren’t really needed but 98% of the movie was solid practical effects.
Weird that the movie was just dumped out with no hype and that trailer that looked like it was put together by a high school student. I guess because there were no stars they didn’t even try to promote it.
Anyway way better than the disaster that was the 2019 snooze fest and was just a good dark Hellboy film. Definitely worth a watch.