HELLBOY... reboot?!?

[lhb412]

I wouldn't mind if the movie's title had a pulpy subtitle. That's the way the comics have always been: "Wake the Devil," "Box Full of Evil," "The Conqueror Worm" etc.

"Hellboy: Rise of the Blood Queen" got the job done, but I didn't like 'Rise' because it feels like that word is used in so many movie titles it's losing its meaning. "Curse of the Blood Queen" sounds better to my ears.

[lhb412]

Since Alice (as and adult) and Gruagach are in this movie I wonder if they'll adapt probably the most famous Hellboy short story, The Corpse, as like a prologue or something. That's the story where Hellboy carries around the talking corpse (as referenced in the first GDT film) but the main thrust of the plot is that a baby (Alice) has been replaced by a changeling (Gruagach) and Hellboy is called on by Alice's family to rescue their child from the faerie folk. Years later Alice returns as an adult and Gruagach becomes a prominent villain.

[Henry88]

http://www.superherohype.com/news/40856 ... lease-date

January 11, 2019 is going to be the release date for Hellboy.

[lhb412]

Hellboy in January and Godzilla in March? It's gonna be a auspicious beginning of the year for stuff I like!

Just... don't suck. GDT's films were great and I don't expect this to really come close, just - hopefully - to be pretty good and cover stuff from the comics we haven't seen adapted before.

[lhb412]

Take a look at this sweet boy!



The film has moved back two months to... my very birthday!

This is special for me, because GDT's original film came out around the time of my birthday *gasp* 14 years ago!

[lhb412]

Lotsa familiar faces (from the comic, at least) in this poster!

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

Well, I'm quite unimpressed with this trailer. The justification for this movie, rebooting after Guillermo del Toro's two well-received entries, has been that will be closer to the comic, darker, grittier... but this trailer seems to be selling a tone similar to those two previous movies, only it looks much cheaper and lacks the incredible visual flare that Guillermo brought to those movies, much less any attempt at replicating the visual styling of Mike Mignola's gorgeous comic book. To tell you the truth, it looks quite plain; similar to the glut of dull, gray special effects action movies made in the previous decade. It's not a good sign that my immediate thought is that it looks like a movie that's 10 years old!

I hope this movie is more of a horror movie full of scares and moodiness and this is simply a horrible trailer that culls shots that are what the advertising department thought people would want out of a Hellboy movie but don't represent the final product.

Even the Hellboy makeup looks less impressive when viewed in motion. It's not very expressive, almost like David Harbour is struggling to act from behind a restrictive mask compared to Ron Perlman's wonderful makeup witch felt full of life even when at rest.

[UltraDada72]

I agree. This looks like it's trying to hard to duplicate Marvel's light-hearted humor. I was interested when I heard David Harbour was going to be Hellboy, but now that I've seen him, he comes off bland.

[klen7]

[lhb412]

^ I definitely saw her chicken-legged house, at least (she's on one of the posters). Also: the vampire bat monster from Hellboy in Mexico, the trolls from The Wild Hunt, and the changeling-turned-Pigman from various stories.

[lhb412]

Huh, this green band trailer is almost the same as the other trailer, but with the few shots of swearing and blood replaced with different shots somehow it flows better? It gives a much better sense of the Lucha Libre scene.

[Gentleman]

I never read the comics, but I enjoyed the hell out of the first two movies (see what I did there?) I'm not loving the makeup on HB's face this time around, but I enjoyed the trailer. Looks like a good story. And after listening to the internet bemoan the light-hearted tone of the trailer, I'm reminded of this:



The GDT Hellboys had their fair share of comic elements, too. I'm more than willing to give Neil Marshall the benefit of the doubt just for Dog Soldiers alone. The man can tell a story.

[lhb412]

New trailer makes the movie look way more fun than the first trailer!

[tbeasley]

I'm trying to hold out hope, I do like Marshall's work on Dog Soldiers and The Descent, but I'm really not feeling this, even as a massive Hellboy fan. And a lot of the BTS drama is rubbing me the wrong way too.

[lhb412]

^ As a fellow Hellboy devotee, I just hope the movie isn't terrible.

I just think the recent trailer suggests an Army of Darkness style horror action comedy thing which could be a lot of fun, while that first trailer suggested very little beyond its own cheapness.

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

^ I was wondering when your sundry tale with circle back to being about Hellboy!

[mr.negativity]

[lhb412]

Yeah, the reviews are universally terrible. They're not only saying the movie is bad, but labeling it as some kind of disaster. Well, as a huge Hellboy fan I'll be seeing it tomorrow anyway, and if it is a trainwreck at least that should make it a bit interesting, eh?

At the very least, we're getting some neat Hellboy merchandise out of it... Although almost all of it based on Mignola's comic and not this movie, which was probably wise!

[mr.negativity]

[jellydonut25]

I'm still marginally curious about the movie and if next week Tuesday rolls around and I get an opportunity, I'll potentially check it out since my local theater does $5 showings on Tuesdays.

But there's also a part of me, not a part I'm proud of or a particularly LARGE part of me, just this small little sliver...that's kinda...glad it's getting slaughtered and poised to bomb just to rub it in Mignola's face. He comes across as a particularly miserable to experience person and while GDT and Perlman certainly didn't handle the situation as best as THEY could have, Mignola handled it like a petulant child.

[lhb412]

^ I adore Mignola as an artist, but he certainly leans into the grumpy cartoonist stereotype. It seemed to really get under his skin that Guillermo's movies were more well-known than his comic, which is (yes) unfair, but simply unavoidable in a culture where movies just reach so much more people. Maybe this will be a good learning experience for him?

(ps- with Ron's advanced age and Selma's unfortunate illness doing a live-action Hellboy 3 is extraordinary unlikely given any circumstance, but with Guillermo going whole-hog into stop motion animation don't you think that that would be an interesting way to do it?)

[Jinzo Ningen]

I admit to being more than mildly curious... but... OUCH! These reviews are scathing in their almost universal condemnation of this reboot. Think I'll wait for home video. Like Jelly, I also feel kinda of... vindicated that this flick is getting roasted. Yes, they're just movies and movies ARE a business so I shouldn't feel that way, and yet I am so attached to the GDT films ...especially Golden Army. I simply ADORE that film, warts and all. It's just such a shame the original group didn't get a chance to complete a third entry in order to give their story some degree of closure. Ahhh well. It is what it is. At least we have those two.

[lhb412]

Yeah, it's bad. Pretty terrible, really. Some spoilers included, but I'll keep it vague.

The story is a hodgepodge a various Hellboy comics, and the movie is at its best in the first half when it plays like a series of vignettes of Hellboy having these crazy adventures. I mean, it's still cheap looking and goofy from the start, but for the first half it maintains an enjoyable B-movie feel, like the action movie equivilant of a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. It's once we pass through these few short stories worth of material to enter the main storyline (we're halfway through the movie before we introduce the rest of the main characters) that the film goes from enjoyably bad to just bad. It feels as though the third act of this movie was cut down from something originally twice as long, as we violently ricochet from plot point to action beat with no connective tissue between them and you feel like there was a tremendous amount left on the cutting-room floor, making it feel like a mediocre collage of footage with no oomph or focus behind anything. What's funny about once the movie gets into the plot heavy part of the movie is that despite pulling directly from Mignola's comic it hits pretty much all the same story beats covered in Guillermo del Toro's previous two movies. You'll be amazed at how similar almost all the sequences in the third act are to scenes much more satisfyingly realized in those previous films.

The cast is pretty game, and try their best with the bad material and dialogue given to them. It's easy to imagine a much better movie with pretty much the same cast. McShane as Broom is maybe the most interesting, as he's a great and charismatic actor yet the character has been rewritten to be so thoroughly unpleasant and unlikable so it all cancels out. His main affectation is that he drops f-bombs in every sentence and is pointlessly mean. Those obscenities were maybe intended to be funny (?), but they don't amount to any memorable zingers...

... That's the weird thing about this R-rated business; it seems like an afterthought. All the swearing and gore feel like they were plopped in at the last minute and none have any punch to them. There's no swear words providing awesome moments like Samuel Jackson dialog in Pulp Fiction, and there's no gore that legitimately surprises and terrifies like the eye-gouging in Fulci's Zombie (to bring up two effective examples). The dirty bits are totally perfunctory and this could easily be a PG-13 movie without losing anything of value.

Oh, it's very cheap. Some of the worst CGI you will see this decade, and a lot of the practical effects are bad, too. At several points you see Hellboy's horns wobble! There are a few well realized practical effects and neat creature designs in there, though.

The Baba Yaga, an incredible character from the comic based on Russian folklore, is reduced to a latexy Goosebumps villain. Lobster Johnson, another great character here played by great actor, is reduced to a pointless cameo who will no doubt completely flummox general audiences.

In short; it's a total systems failure of a movie. It's vastly inferior to Guillermo del Toro's movies, and it falls so woefully short of the comic books on which it's directly based that fans of neither will have much to like.