*** (out of ****)
Starring Ron Perlman, John Hurt, Rupert Evans, Selma Blair, Jeffrey Tambor, Karel Roden, Corey Johnson, David Hyde Pierce, Doug Jones, and Biddy Hodson
Directed by Guillermo Del Toro & written by Guillermo Del Toro and Peter Briggs, from the comic books by Mike Mignola
2004
132 min PG13
“Hell Boy” is what you’d get after playing video games like “Return to Castle Wolfenstein” and “Doom 3-D” for twenty hours solid and declaring “well, why the *%&! shouldn’t there be a movie like this?” I knew I was in for a treat when, within the first few minutes, the narrator had announced that he was “President Roosevelt’s paranormal advisor” and that “the Nazis were combining science and black magic.” If this movie were any more over-the-top, we might have another “Kill Bill” on our hands.
Let’s quickly check off just some of the things you’re likely to encounter in the world of “Hell Boy.” We got the mad monk Rasputin, resurrected and on the payroll of the Third Reich. We got two reanimated corpses, one wisecracking and the other adept at kung-fu. We got a secret government agency that fights the supernatural. We got magic bullets, straight from the Vatican. We got four-eyed hell hounds that clone themselves every time you kill one. We visit an endless parade of underground laboratories, Gothic cemeteries, abandoned subway stations, and spooky catacombs. We get a devil filing down his horns with a power sander. We get a mad scientist with the requisite tiny glasses and wild white hair. We meet a surgery addict who has no eyelids. We get to see the moon turned into a portal to Hades. We have books “not officially condoned by the Church,” that have instructions on how to alternately raise the dead or kill the undead. You know, whichever. We enter a world where a job as “night watchman” or “security guard” is practically a death sentence. We hear so many Eastern European accents but nary a word in any language besides English. If all this sounds stupid, you’re probably right. But if you’re fighting off a smirk, then “Hell Boy” is a movie for you.
Enter Hell Boy (actor Ron Perlman beneath a lot of prosthetics), a demon brought into the world of the living when he was just a baby and lured to the side of goodness by two Baby Ruths and a warm towel. Our world is a little colder than what he’s used to. Now he’s all grown up, has broken off his horns, and fights the forces of evil—including the aforementioned Russian monk (Karel Roden), hell hounds, and walking dead—on behalf of the U.S. government. Hell Boy—or HB, as his friends call him—is joined by his adopted father (John Hurt, in an apparently rare moment of sobriety) and a slippery fish guy (Doug Jones, voiced by “Frasier’s” David Hyde Pierce) who reads books, minds, and what’s just happened to inanimate objects.
You would think a life blasting monsters with a revolver the size of Dirk’s Diggler would be enough for any man, but Hell Boy is starting to get cabin fever from being cooped up in the underground laboratory all the time. And he’s also having personal problems, what with his special lady’s (Selma Blair) decision to trade the crime-fighting lifestyle for a quiet room at the local sanitarium. She can shoot flames out of her hands. We’re introduced to all this by a young FBI agent (Rupert Evans), whose basic personality is as average as possible.
Most of the movie’s humor comes from the characters, and the movie itself, being at one moment in total awe of the supernatural, and in the next being completely accustomed to it (the others agents casually refer to Hell Boy as “Red” and the fish guy as “Blue”). With that approach, Perlman’s HB is quickly able to become the sympathetic center of the movie. The greatest accomplishment of all the makeup and trickery used to make him blood red, horned, fanged, and as a big as a refrigerator with arms and a tail, is that none of it smothers his personality. Despite all the artifice, we are still able to read his expressions and body language.
Perlman has made a career being at home and believable amidst special effects and beneath tons of make-up. He was the Beast on TV’s “Beauty and the Beast,” he played the strongman One in “City of Lost Children,” was a heavy in the second “Blade” film, and blasted extra-terrestrials and cracked wise in “Alien Resurrection.” He plays Hell Boy as a jock who’s all bluster and angry loner on top, but an inarticulate cat-loving softy underneath. He says “crap” a lot and has a dry wit whose intermittent success may demonstrate that Hell Boy’s tough guy act is only skin deep. As superpowers go, he’s comparable to The Tick in that he’s really big, really strong, and occasionally not all that bright. The image of the demon with the broken horns is an effective one; we can still choose the path of righteousness, regardless of our flawed natures. The other important life lessons we learn from “Hell Boy” are that Satan lives in outer space and Nazis are filled with sand.
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