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CRAWLING
CHAOS
Sheila
Seacroft on Hellboy
Take a pinch
of Men in Black, a dash of Hulk, a touch of Raiders of
the Lost Ark, a hint of Ghostbusters, a drizzle of Monkey,
a soupçon of Beauty and the Beast, and stir in a handful of ra-ra-Rasputin
and writhing misto del mare from the Venice fish market, and you’ve
got an idea of the overseasoned and indigestible boullabaisse that is
this film.
Hellboy, some
sort of imp conjured through a supernatural portal by the Nazis during
the war in a crumbling church in, erm, yes, Scotland, is won over from
the dark side with Baby Ruth Chocolate Bars and cuddles by a paranormal
specialist later to become John Hurt. Well it worked for the GIs with
our women, after all.
Now a strapping
scarlet hulk with horns which he files down every morning because he doesn’t
much care for them, Hellboy (Ron 4-hours-in-makeup-every-morning Perlman)
lives with Prof Broom, aka ‘Dad’ (Hurt) in quarters specially provided
for parahumans like him, where a fellow oddity is the fishlike Abe Sapien
(Doug Jones) who lives in a water tank reading 4 books at a time through
the glass.
He is a quivering-wristed,
cerebral, sensitive but tough being, not unrelated, I suspect, to Red
Dwarf’s Kryten, with a strangely familiar voice. (It was no surprise when
I discovered later that his voice was actually supplied by David Hyde-Pierce,
Niles Crane from Frasier.) The word is getting out about Hellboy,
however, as he makes the occasional sortie into the city to Fight Evil.
For, like all massive creatures of his ilk, he is a big softy at heart,
never more so than when thinking of his lost love, the mournfully beautiful
firestarter (Selma Blair), who also has eyes for Hellboy’s bland minder
John Myers (Rupert Evans)
But what a
load of baddies. There’s Rasputin (Karel Roden), whom even stabbing drowning
castrating shooting poisoning and generally whupping couldn’t get rid
of, recreated from blood welling up from an ancient maze in Moldova; the
statutory evil Aryan Nazi blonde, (Bridget Hodson in a rather thankless
role with little to do other than curl her lip); there’s Kroenen, a diabolical
black-clad-bloke who has cut off his eyelids and lips, though the effect
is rather lost as his face is always covered. With one twist of his metallic
nipple he sprouts flashing blades, spelling doom for all around.
And there
are lots, and lots, and lots, of decidedly nasty oozy many-tentacled cuttle
fish type creatures, recreated from seeds in the burial urn of St Dionysius,
I kid you not. The first one we see is all fine and scary-ish, but when
you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Impervious to every kind of injury
except being torn apart or burned, they prove a bit of a pain to Hellboy,
and to this viewer too, and I’m not sure whose heart sank the lower every
time a few dozen more were spawned and did their ‘Here I Come!’ dribbly
roar.
There’s unremitting
clanging and roaring and screaming and falling down and whooshing around
and slamming into hard surfaces, and precious little else, no real suspense,
no shocks, and a script as clunking as the various metallic doors which
slam shut with depressing regularity just missing our heroes. And though
I am clearly not the target audience for this kind of movie, it really
felt like overkill on the special effects front.
How I longed
for those days of innocence when seeing Ronald Lacey’s face melt in Raiders
of the Lost Ark was the height of grisly horror, and we actually cared
a bit about the characters. Despite overdone attempts at making Hellboy
lovable and folksy, even to the stock scene where our ugly hero sits down
and shares his heartache with a cute child on a rooftop who exhorts him
to ‘Tell her how you feel!’, my heart was as stone. So, will Rasputin’s
evil plans to destroy the earth succeed? Will Hellboy win the girl of
his heart? What do you think?
August 31st,
2004
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