Film Summary CCCII (Hellboy)

You ever have one of those movies that you remember from years ago being great but you never get around to watching again. Well Hllboy is that one for me. I remember really enjoying this movie several years ago and I keep wanting to watch it.
Now I'm a bit afraid. I'm really concerned that Hellboy is going to turn out to be a bad movie and that's going to make me very sad.
I remember watching 'Independence Day' and 'Wild Wild West' when I was 8 years old these two movies were amazing. And as I've gotten older they've only become worse. Especially Wild Wild West, Independence Day is not all that good but at least it's watchable.
So now here we go, let's spend that roulette wheel and see if Hellboy holds up.

It's fine... Really that's all I can say about it, It's exactly as I remember. And I guess I should be happy about that, it's a strange mystical world full of Nazis and Cthulhu Mythos. And the whole thing's played relatively straight. With the only real comedy coming in from Ron Perlman with his occasional one-liners. It's kind of nice to be honest having a universe that isn't self-aware or trying to play up comedy every 5 minutes. It's just a movie and that's all it has to be. It's also nice that we don't have to deal with an origin story, Ron Perlman's character has been doing this for years.
Luckily we get the secondary character John Meijer. He's the boring detective who's assigned to help Hellboy and mainly for serving dinner. The good thing about his character is he gets to act as our 'fish out of water' protagonist. Even though Hellboy is technically the real protagonist. But it wouldn't be doing us any good to have him asking a million questions every 5 minutes. So instead we have Myers and I think his character overall is is fine. Usually in these types of movies I always get annoyed by these types, the dorky* Weasley moron takes up too much of valuable time and often gets in the way. What is dorkiness is kept to a minimum and he's actually helpful in the story.

I forgot how fun the story in this film was. A group of Nazis get together with the supposedly dead
Rasputin to activate a portal to bring about the Cthulhu-like gods. All being accompanied by a strange-looking knife-wielding psychopath who wears a gas mask. It's all played straight!
I can't stress how much I like that. All the 4th wall breaking, self-aware comedy that's become so prevalent in the modern comic movies is just the most annoying thing. It's not as if this film is without comedy. Ron Perlman is cracking jokes every five seconds. And everybody else constantly makes reference to how weird everything is. But they do this through character interaction. The universe does not suffer for the comedy.
The closest thing we get to self-aware Comedy is when they showing one of the Hellboy comic books that Hellboy happens to own. He makes reference to them never being able to get the eyes right. And that's it, that's all the self-reference humor you're going to find. I think the strangest thing about this movie is it builds itself on being about the return of Rasputin and the destruction of the universe that can be brought about by Hellboy himself. But then most the movie spent hunting down this weird demon dog thing who looks like he belongs in a Ghostbusters movie.
The CGI in this movie is surprisingly good too. It's by no means Flawless and it is dated. It looks good enough that it doesn't take you out of the film but at the same time it's not so good that minor imperfections become blatantly obvious. It's a good solid mix, also a lot of the other characters are covered in Practical makeup. Like Ron Perlman and Doug Jones (Although the voice acting was done by David Price)We also get some honest-to-god matte paintings . I'm always ecstatic to see them so much work and detail goes into something that most people will overlook. And even I overlooked them at the first time watching this film.
And the colour! the colour of this movie is absolutely fantastic everything Clash is so beautifully.

 

I don't know why but I really like Jeffrey Tambor character, he's a kind of mini antagonist who doesn't care much for Hellboy. But you can't really blame the guy his job is to make sure the general public doesn't figure out that their entire world is Infested by monsters and this big red dumbass constantly runs about outside getting exposed to said public. Maybe I'm just a Jeffrey Tambor fan in just about everything he does.

I always liked how the original attempt to open the portal was done with technology that was invented under the Nazi regime. Where is later on they went old school With magical chains and a big stone wall that can only be activated by Hellboy himself. Funny enough it's the supposedly ''God'' at the end who's the most disappointing thing. It's a big tentacle monster that grabs Hellboy for a minute swallows him and then perceives to blow up because Hellboy happened to be holding on to some grenades at the time.

It has no bearing on the actual film but on the director's commentary you'll notice that the Guillermo del Toro announces Cthulhu in one of his more interesting if not correct variations. That being K-too-loo. There are people out there that argue that this pronounce is also incorrect. I say it doesn't really matter, Lovecraft himself purposely pronounced the name differently when talking to various people. And his name today there's more similarity to the god Yahweh whose name can also be used in a myriad of different Fashions. Such as Jehovah,YHWH and Adonai. The only reason I bring it up at all is because 90% of all people only pronounce Cthulhu And to hear it said any other way is to know that you're dealing with somebody who at the very least is a Lovecraft fan.

I still have to consider this one of the best comic book movies simply because it got me to want to read Hellboy.

*Part of me also thinks he's prominent in this movie because of the event still very popular Spider-Man films. And we have to be able to save off of their success