Rating: **
Review Date: 1/12/25
Writer: Mike Mignola
Cast: Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Leah McNamara
"It is dark down there. Dark as the Devil's asshole."
It's 1959, and Hellboy (Jack Kesy) and parapsychologist Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) are escorting a spider demon back to BPRD headquarters. Somewhere in Appalachia, the demon awakes and escapes into a coal mine. Jo tries to call for backup, but there are no phones in hillbilly country - only witches. Conveniently, at the exact same time, a man named Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) shows up to deal with a local evil known as "The Crooked Man," and he joins forces with Hellboy.
While the idea of it being a straight-up horror story written by Mike Mignola is appealing, the execution is sorely lacking. It might have made a good comic book, but as a film it's simply terrible. The production also suffers from a very lean budget, and unconvincing CGI sets the tone in the first few seconds of the movie. You know a picture is in trouble when the director himself has to use his personal copy of After Effects to finish the film because it ran out of money. However, visual effects aside, the location shooting in Bulgaria looks lovely and the lighting is appropriately moody.
I wasn't thrilled by Jack Kesy's portrayal of Hellboy and he smokes WAY too much. Maybe a half dozen cigarettes would have been okay, but he lights up so frequently that it becomes a distraction. And while I think Ron Perlman delivered the definitive version of the character, I appreciated that Kesy's version was much more mature, despite the movie taking place 40 years earlier than Guillermo del Toro's films. Perlman's Hellboy had an annoyingly adolescent attitude, whereas Kesy's is just dull and cynical. The film's brightest spot is the lovely Adeline Rudolph, who has to overcome her inexperience in the field. Her radiant Asian beauty makes her stand out even more than Hellboy does in hillbilly country. The other highlight is a shockingly seductive witch played by Leah McNamara, who emanates powerfully charged sexual energy.
The soundtrack is sparse and alternates between hillbilly swamp music and creepy strings to set the mood. Neither works particularly well. The Appalachian accents are so thick that I actually had to watch the film with subtitles so that I could understand what they were saying. The pacing is dreadfully slow, and even with its relatively short running time, most of the film feels like filler material. I really wanted to enjoy this movie, but it was a constant disappointment. It looks and feels like an Uwe Boll film, and the uninteresting villain reminded me so much of Warwick Davis's Leprechaun that I had a hard time not laughing at him.