If you knew there was a new Hellboy movie this year – the fourth live action one – chances are you weren’t thrilled about that fact. For most people, it seems, HELLBOY was two movies directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Ron Perlman and since those guys aren’t making a third one that’s it, end of story, no further questions your honor.
That was the response in 2019 when there was a third one made on not much more than half the budget of HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY, with a different tone, directed by Neil Marshall and starring David Harbour as Hellboy. The makeup just isn’t as good, it’s jokier than I wanted, but hell, it won me over. It’s less reverent than the Del Toros, more in the style of 2000s CG-driven studio b-movies, and even has Milla Jovovich as the villain. In some ways I thought it was more in the spirit of the comics by Mike Mignola than the Del Toro movies were, though with a whole bunch of different stories crammed into one movie, so it feels pretty hectic.
Before greenlighting HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN they must’ve checked around and found out I was the only person who liked the 2019 one. So they started over with a new Hellboy (Jack Kesy, DARK WEB: CICADA 3301), a new director (Brian Taylor, MOM AND DAD), and less than half the budget of the previous lower budgeted one. In the U.S. it went straight to V.O.D. with an ugly poster and publicity stills that made it look like a fan film.
Francis Ford Coppola’s BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA is an incredible fucking movie that I previously mistook for a pretty good one. I saw it first on opening night in 1992, when I thought it was cool and weird, if flawed. (If you would like to imagine my wild teen years, I remember it was a foggy Friday the 13th and I was bummed that I hadn’t done anything good on Halloween, so I drove a carload of friends to an evening show, blasting the score from 
I’m not gonna totally contradict the conventional wisdom that HELLBOY (2019) is bad. I kinda thought it was bad for a while. But then it sort of won me over. I had more fun than expected, and talking about it with other people made me realize that yeah, overall I think I liked it.
