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In a bucket

A Hellboy movie without director Guillermo del Toro proves to be a very unfortunate thing with Hellboy, the third movie based on the classic Dark Horse comic.

This isn’t a sequel. It’s a reboot, and a cheapassed, sloppy reboot at that. David Harbour steps in for Ron Perlman to play the title role, while Neil Marshall (The Descent) haphazardly directs in place of Guillermo del Toro. While Harbour (Stranger Things) is OK in the role, he does little to distinguish himself, basically doing some lightweight riffing on a character Perlman established. He’s a lot like Perlman, but he’s not as good as Perlman.

Gone is the richness and depth of del Toro’s world, replaced by choppy CGI, unimpressive makeup and messy editing. The movie is just one lackluster action sequence after another, strung together with slow dialogue scenes that do nothing to make the film feel coherent.

The movie starts off on a goofy note, with Hellboy in a wrestling match with his former partner turned vampire. That sounds stupid, and it is, giving the film a silly note to start on as the narrative jumps from vampire-slaying to giant-hunting. Hellboy battles giants, who are represented with the aforementioned choppy CGI. Marshall apparently got the go ahead to incorporate a lot of gore, and the movie has a lot of blood, to the point where it has a numbing effect.

The main villain here is Nimue, also known as The Blood Queen and played campily by Milla Jovovich. One of the film’s many flashbacks shows Nimue in a showdown with King Arthur, resulting in her getting her arms and legs cut off. As I write this, I realize that King Arthur cutting somebody into bits with his sword is very Monty Python and the Holy Grail, something that didn’t dawn on me while I was actually watching the movie. That would probably be because The Holy Grail was classic fun, and Hellboy is a miserable time. Fun comparisons were miles away from my brain.

The film isn’t totally void of visual coolness. When Hellboy emerges from his hole with fire crown and horns, wielding Excalibur, you get a sense of what might have been had Marshall found a consistent tone. The movie doesn’t know if it’s a horror movie, a comedy or a comic fantasy. And it doesn’t work as a horror/comedy because it is neither funny nor scary.

One thing this movie offers that, I confess, I’ve never seen before, is the psychic ghost puker. Actor Ian McShane has endured some embarrassing moments onscreen during his illustrious career, but this movie features a scene where his character’s ghost is vomited out of somebody’s mouth. He becomes a sort of puke ghost, a grotesque body with a fairly normal head, flowing out of a person’s face. McShane is then forced to recite some earnest dialogue, all while appearing as a vomit ghost. It’s amazing, in a bad way, that the puke ghosts made it into a movie. Some ideas need to die in the writer’s room.

The stated budget for this movie was $50 million, low by today’s blockbuster standards, and lower than del Toro’s Hellboy movies. Del Toro wanted to make a third movie, but he left the project due to creative differences. I think his exit probably had to do with the producers being cheap. While del Toro’s works were masterful pieces of art direction, this Hellboy looks like countless other cheaply shot dark fantasies before it.

The final scene of the film seems to be setting the table for a sequel, a sequel that won’t happen for a long time, if ever. Del Toro was ready and willing to put together the third and final chapter in his Hellboy trilogy. Instead we get this, a shlocky restart to a franchise that, most assuredly, will stall again. Ω

“So ... we’re just going to carry the head around, huh?”

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1The Dirt Jeff Tremaine, director of Jackass films, tries to deliver an actual narrative movie and bombs miserably with this lame biopic of Motley Crue. Based on the book written by members of the band, the film covers the band from formation through their career and makes a mess of the whole thing. For starters, Tommy Lee-lookalike Machine Gun Kelly delivers a bad performance as the iconic drummer, making him into more of a cartoon than he already is. Daniel Webber is an annoying prick as lead singer Vince Neil, who actually is an annoying prick in real life, too, so I guess he gets a pass. Douglas Booth renders bassist Nikki Sixx boring, while Iwan Rheon is the closest thing to any fun as the old, grumpy guitarist Mick Mars. I confess, I’ve never liked the band, and I find their music amateurish and shitty, so liking a movie about them might be a stretch. Still, we are talking some bad wig acting here, and nothing revelatory whatsoever about the group. They had groupies. They did drugs, blah, blah, blah. I never thought I’d see a rock biopic that annoyed me more than Bohemian Rhapsody, but here you go. (Streaming on Netflix.)

1Dumbo The decline of Tim Burton continues with Dumbo, his wasteful remake of the classic animated movie that amounts to a big nothing, for kids and adults alike. The original Dumbo clocked in at just over an hour, while this one lasts for nearly two hours that feel like 40. Yes, the running time has been padded, but not with anything that registers as beneficial. A bunch of unnecessary subplots and added characters take away time from the title character, an admittedly cute CGI achievement. There are no talking animals in this movie, so scratch Timothy the mouse, the singing crows and the lullaby from Mama elephant off your list of expectations. The mouse—who makes a brief appearance as a caged mouse wearing a hat—is replaced by the requisite precocious children, one of them played by Thandie Newton’s daughter. Sorry, Thandie Newton’s daughter, but you can’t act. Colin Farrell appears as Holt, the precocious children’s dad, back from World War I with one arm, and his wife died of the flu while traveling with the circus. The circus is led by Max Medici (a blustery Danny DeVito), who has purchased a cheap, pregnant elephant. He wants Holt to be the keeper of his elephants, a comedown from his previous gig as a circus cowboy. Farrell, like most of the humans in this movie, seems lost. V.A. Vandevere, the villain of the film, played by Michael Keaton, purchases Dumbo and plans to make him a main attraction at his Dreamland, which has a strong resemblance to Disneyland. So, in a way, Vandevere is modeled after Walt Disney and is portrayed as an evil megalomaniac. So, in essence, Burton gets away with indirectly portraying Walt Disney as a bit of a greedy monster. I’m not saying this is anything inaccurate, but it’s a little odd to see in an actual Disney movie.

2Pet Sematary The original cinematic take on Stephen King’s supposed scariest novel was a camp horror hoot, a strange mixture of gore and satire that holds up pretty well today. This take is more of a straightforward approach to King’s story about humans who can’t deal with death, especially when it comes to pets and family members. Jason Clarke steps in as Louis Creed, big city doctor moving to the country, where his wonderful new house is unfortunately bordered by a pet cemetery/Indian burial ground in the back and a road full of speeding trucks to the front. The death of the family cat leads to an ill-advised burial in the cemetery, which leads to a zombie return of the beloved cat. The cat is followed by a family member, and King fans will be surprised to see who that family member is (as long as you haven’t seen many of the commercials). This remake is sorely lacking the sense of humor that made the original twisted in a solid, King sort of way. The behavior of everybody in this movie is so stupid that when it is played straight, it just comes off as moronic rather than scary. Jete Laurence is very good as the young daughter, and John Lithgow is OK with a more serious take on neighbor Jud (played by the late, great Fred Gwynne in the original). The movie drifts away from the original book too much in the end and, again, could’ve used a few more sick laughs. It’s admirable that the filmmakers were shooting for something other than a note by note remake of the original but, by going off book too much, they lose some of the cruel sting of King’s intentions.

3Shazam! The DC universe gets its best movie since Wonder Woman with Shazam!, a fun—and sometimes shockingly dark—blast of comic book superhero fantasy. While a little sloppy at times, the movie works thanks to its central performances and warmhearted core. Zachary Levi proves an excellent choice to play the title character, the net result of a 14-year-old boy being handed super powers by a wizard (Djimon Hounsou). That boy is Billy Batson (Asher Angel), a foster child in search of his real mom. When he yells “Shazam!” a lightning bolt blasts him in his melon, and he becomes the glorious, red-suited, white-caped superhero, albeit a superhero with a 14-yearold’s brain. This gives Levi the chance to do a Tom Hanks-in-Big kind of shtick, and he’s good at it. The new Shazam, who goes by various names, including Captain Sparkle Fingers, gets coached by his superheroobsessed sidekick and foster brother, Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer). Freddy is one of the big reasons this movie works despite its flaws. Grazer employs the same kind of whip smart line delivery that made him one of the more memorable kids running away from Pennywise. While the movie doesn’t always work due to some abrupt tonal shifts and subpar CGI, it’s refreshing to see DC go a comedic, shiny superhero route after the gloomy blunders that were Man of Steel, Batman v Superman and Justice League and the goofy bombast of Aquaman. Shazam! has some of the joy that’s missing from the latest Superman flicks.

4Us Oh, those evil doppelgangers and their wonderful place in horror lore. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Twin Peaks, The Thing and now Us, Jordan Peele’s extremely creepy follow up to Get Out. The film starts with a quote about America having many miles of tunnels underneath its surface, then a quick flashback shot of a C.H.U.D. videotape next to a VCR. A TV plays an advertisement for Hands Across America, and you already have all sorts of subtext before anything even really happens. When a young girl (Madison Curry) in the same ’80s flashback drifts away from her father at an amusement park and finds herself in a darkened hall of mirrors, Peele immediately states that he’s not playing around with this movie. Prepare to be scared, disturbed and uncomfortable in a good way. The film then jumps to the present day, where Adelaide and Gabe (Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) are taking their children, Zora and Jason (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex) to the beach. It’s the same beach we saw in the flashback and, much to her chagrin, Adelaide was that young girl who ventured into that hall of mirrors. She’s not happy about revisiting the Santa Cruz pier, but the husband and kids really want to, so she takes one for the team. Us has a larger scope than I was expecting and qualifies as one of the better apocalypse movies I’ve ever seen. No question, writer-director Peele has been gobbling up zombie, slasher and isolation horror movies all of his life, and their influences play a significant part in his vision. The movie is a mind-bender, but it’s also an efficient, bare-knuckled horror-thriller. In short, it’s the whole package as far as horror movies go.