I'm not a big fan of Comics ("pre pubescent & adolescent art") or Gothic, and "Hellboy" incorporates both, but as a comic book since 1993, Mike Mignola, it's creator has built a dedicated following, and the movie based on the comic character, directed by Guillermo del Toro topped the Box Office this week, at $ 24 million, doubling runner up Rock's "Walking Tall".

Del Toro turned down directing the third "Harry Potter" film to do "Hellboy".

"Hellboy", the adventures of a half-human demon who runs a government agency, has attracted a growing following that includes many comics industry professionals. Mignola's ability to rework mythic themes into visceral, character-oriented stories, along with his strong, expressive way of drawing, has not only brought him the admiration of fellow artists but also of Hollywood — he's contributed to two major horror movies and Walt Disney Productions saw fit to give their artists lessons on Mignola's style for use in their recent animated feature "Atlantis".

Hellboy, like any American comedy protagonist, is always trying to explain himself and do what's right. That ambition is what gets him into trouble and is the truest definition of hell.

"Hellboy" is rated PG-13 for violence, alcohol consumption, hordes of disturbing,
soul-sucking creatures and, arguably, its title character's name.
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MOVIE REVIEW | 'HELLBOY'
HORROR COMIC AT THE CORE, WITH A SOULFULL SWEETNESS
New York Times
By Elvis Mitchell
April 2, 2004

Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience — the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction. The writer and director Guillermo del Toro has brought a similar woozy, disconcerting melancholy to his film adaptation, and his obvious affection and affinity for that dankness alone would make "Hellboy" worth seeing. But Mr. del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.

For Mr. del Toro, this is hard-core. He turned down a shot at directing the third "Harry Potter" film because he nurtured a need to bring Mr. Mignola's colossal, monstrous-looking, Twizzler-colored champion to the screen. The director's determination pays off, mostly, as a dreamy mating of filmmaker, craft and material.

He also multiplied what Mr. Mignola (and John Byrne, who wrote the script of the comic series "Seed of Destruction," from which the movie comes) envisioned by casting Ron Perlman in the lead, an actor whose unruffled, seedy dynamism gives Hellboy a raffish soulfulness. Mr. del Toro's concentration and visible love of the material and Mr. Perlman's witty and intuitive performance keep the movie afloat when the action sequences threaten to make it routine. Mr. Perlman enriches the film with emotional complication, giving Hellboy's vanity a piquancy. This devilish beast files down the horns on his head and has the swagger of a hipster mutant who takes pleasure in swatting down evil and exhaling plumes of smoke from a constant stream of cigars.

The story is pretty complicated. During World War II, Hitler, apparently anticipating story elements of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," sends a special squad led by Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), the mad, mad monk, to rend the interdimensional barriers and obtain a creature that will give the edge to the Nazis. Given that the Nazis' black-magic squad has the unkillable Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) slicing through the Allies with a pair of gleaming retractable blades, you have to ask how much more of an edge does the Third Reich need? (If Hitler had access to just one of the superassassins assigned to him in the movies, we'd be living in a very different world today.)

Rasputin accomplishes his otherworldly task with a whirling device that sends blue-white bolts through the countryside and also looks like the logo of one of the film's financiers, Revolution Studios. Rasputin's conjuring leads to the emergence of an infant creature, red as sin, with a long tail, who falls into the hands of the Allies. The kindly British scientist Dr. Broom (John Hurt) tames the tiny scarlet devil with a Baby Ruth the size of a bazooka. Adopted by Dr. Broom, Hellboy, with his huge, stonelike left arm, becomes the go-to guy for the good doctor and the antiapparition league known as the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

The movie shifts to the modern day, when that bureau is run by the snarling Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), who's growing tired of coming up with lies to hide Hellboy's existence. He's charged with maintaining both Hellboy, who consumes mass quantities of food and beer, and the sensitive psychic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), the water-dweller with the flesh of a trout (and a sonorous voice supplied by David Hyde Pierce). A new agent is assigned to baby-sit the pair, the nervous John Myers (Rupert Evans).

And when Rasputin and his ageless Nazi love, the she-wolf Ilsa (Bridget Hodson), let loose another dangerous force on the world, the lizardlike Sammael (Brian Steele), the situation requires the reactivation of a bureau agent, Liz (Selma Blair). Liz has pyro-telekinetic abilities she can barely control, not to mention another fiery-red power she cannot contain: Hellboy, whose crush on her is as mountainous as his appetite. (Ms. Blair's heavy-lidded eyes seem to be at half mast from some lovely lewd fantasy. With her sleepy carnality and dry, hesitant timing, she is a superb foil for Mr. Perlman's plain-spoken bravado. If you look like Hellboy, why hide anything?)

When Agent Myers, a mere mortal, gets into the middle of things, he seems to be a greater immediate threat than the immortal Sammael, who is reborn as two separate Sammaels every time he's killed. There's also a greater imminent threat: the destiny that Rasputin hints for Hellboy.

It's tough to bring a comic-book character to movie life because the incestuous homage that comics pay to one another is so prevalent. The ragtag group of unwanted, neurotic heroes feels like the X-Men, and the seat of evil that Rasputin and his team occupy has been seen in a thousand B pictures. Without the idiosyncratic boldness that the original artists convey on the page — like Mr. Mignola's art, with its Expressionist woodcut cartoonishness — comics-based movies often only echo what's come before in narrative terms.

What distinguishes "Hellboy" from the pack and gives it squirmy, ferocious life is the environment that Mr. del Toro creates on screen. The movie is lubricated with a fluid, slimy menace, and the director's love of rotted, desiccated flesh and exposed, traumatized organs adds an engrossing grossness. But a contrasting vulnerability has also been slipped in, a critical addition. When Abe Sapien goes off to investigate a Sammael appearance, there's a mounting awareness of how ill suited he is to an encounter with this slavering hybrid.

And the jealous Hellboy, stalking Myers and Liz on a date, vaults from rooftop to rooftop and ends up chatting about life and love with a 9-year-old boy from whom he filches cookies and milk. And when Manning and Hellboy's gruffness come nose to nose, the tension between them melts when Manning gives his charge a paternal and accurate lecture on how to light a cigar properly.

Mr. del Toro avidly lavishes this texture on "Hellboy," which opens nationwide today, giving it a kiss of distinction. It's an elegant haunted house of a picture with dread and yearning part of the eeriness. Mr. Perlman's mastery of bad-tempered volubility makes "Hellboy" a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the "Fantastic Four" comics. Like any American comedy protagonist, he's always trying to explain himself and do what's right. That ambition is what gets him into trouble and is the truest definition of hell.

"Hellboy" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned) for violence, alcohol consumption, hordes of disturbing, soul-sucking creatures and, arguably, its title character's name.

Movie Review | 'Hellboy': Horror Comic at the Core, With a Soulful Sweetness
http://movies2.nytimes.com/2004/04/02/movies/02HELL.html
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Thumbnail: Mike Mignola
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=787

Sequential Tart: Mike Mignola - Demonology 101 (vol V/iss 6/June 2002)
http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/june02/mignola.shtml