Starring Jack Kesy, Jefferson White, Adeline Rudolph, Leah McNamara, Suzanne Bertish, Joseph Marcell and Martin Bassindale.
Written by Christopher Golden, Mike Mignola and Brian Taylor
Directed by Brian Taylor. Produced by Jeffrey Greenstein, Yariv Lerner, Mike Richardson, Sam Schulte, Les Weldon and Jonathan Yunger.
Campbell Grobman Films/Dark Horse Entertainment/Millennium Media

In 1959 Hellboy, who is accompanied by BPRD agent Bobbie Jo Song, has an occult adventure in the witch-filled woods of the Appalachians, where he teams-up with the stoic hillbilly hero Tom Ferrell and encounters the hellish Crooked Man, whilst also hunting down an escaped funnel-web spider that houses a demonic entity.

This is an engaging, more compact instalment of the Hellboy saga, underlining the horror aspects of the comic book source material and deftly maintaining a folksy supernatural tone throughout.

Jefferson White is particularly good as Tom, a character inspired by Manly Wade Wellman’s pulp horror protagonist Silver John, Adeline Rudolph plays special agent Bobbie Jo Song nicely as someone who views all the supernatural occurrences and practices from a very scientific perspective, and Jack Kesy is actually a really good Hellboy.

The Crooked Man himself (played by Martin Bassindale) is an interesting screen bogieman, though he did look scarier, I think, in the comic book version, as illustrated by the late, great Richard Corben.

There’s a lot of cool, interesting content and imagery in the movie: a witch refills her skin-suit by crawling back into it whilst in the form of a raccoon, and a supernatural black snake slithers from between a character’s legs and slides down her throat in a continuous cycle – and there’s other memorable stuff, including the lowdown on how to make witchballs. 

HELLBOY: THE CROOKED MAN is not as big scale or glossy as its predecessors, but this works to its advantage, helping the film to come across as more faithful to the vibe (and often more modest scope ) of many of Hellboy creator Mike Mignola’s original yarns.

I really enjoyed this flick, and I would definitely like to see more Hellboy films told in this style!