Jack Kesy as Hellboy in “Hellboy: The Crooked Man”
There are very few constants in this life – except death, taxes and a new one Hell movie every few years.
Half a decade after Lionsgate tried to reboot Mike Mignola’s magnum opus on the big screen, the demonic paranormal investigator with a heart of gold — and a love of the word “damn” — is set to return this year in a new film titled Hellboy: The Crooked Man. Named after the Eisner Award-winning miniseries by Mignola and the late Richard Corben, this feature adaptation of the long-running Dark Horse comic sees Jack Kesy (The Executive, Deadpool 2) steps into the iconic, prosthetic-heavy role previously played by Ron Perlman and David Harbour.
Speaking with me over the phone about his upcoming art gallery exhibition in New York, Mignola teases the upcoming film as “a much more down-to-earth Hell film and the most faithful adaptation of a story of mine.”
It should, considering the writer/illustrator wrote several early drafts of the script with longtime collaborator Christopher Golden. “I said, ‘Listen, if we’re going to do this … and you want me involved, let’s get my favorite story that works,'” he adds, referring to The Crooked Mana ’50s-era piece in which Big Red faces witches and a soul-hoarding entity in the wilds of Appalachia.
The script also incorporates a number of elements from The chained coffin historythat sheds light on Hellboy’s history. But less was definitely more for Mignola, who believes the main failure behind the 2019 revamp was her desire to merge decades of ideas into one cinematic entity. “Let’s not say, ‘Oh, but it would be great to have Lobster Johnson!'” ‘It would be great to have that other character!’ Yes, everyone has favorite tracks from 30 years ago Hellbut let’s not try to put a bunch of extra sh** in here where we don’t need it.”
Once he and Golden had built a solid foundation — or what Mignola calls “the skeleton of this thing” — the final creative pass fell to director Brian Taylor, one half of the cinematic duo known as Neveldine/Taylor (known for the work them in such well-known kind offers as Crank, Gamerand Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance).
“All my favorite scenes from The Crooked Man it’s in there,” Mignola continues. “It’s exciting for me to look at something and go, ‘Oh, that’s a bunch of stuff I never imagined I’d see on screen.’ All the Hell movies are different, they all have their own. They all work to some extent in their own way. I don’t want to say that this is the best movie. All I can say is that this is the most faithful film. i could [even] say it’s my favorite It has some of my favorites Hell moments in there.”
On the less optimistic side of things, Mignola continues to confirm that the chances of Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (The shape of water, Nightmare Alley) reaching to close his established ones Hell the trilogy is lower than Hell itself:
“I just can’t see him coming back Hell again. He has so many other things he always wanted to do. It’s a shame [the trilogy] i’m not done but i just don’t think it would ever really happen. It was something of a dream, but I don’t think it was ever realistic. From what I understand, it would be surprisingly expensive, following two movies that didn’t make money.”
Hellboy (Jack Kesy) Fights the Dead in ‘Hellboy: The Crooked Man’
Still, the question remains: why does Hellboy endure? What makes him such a popular character with readers and moviegoers alike three decades after his debut? Mignola believes it all boils down to one thing: despite his imposing appearance, Anung Un Rama is just “a regular guy” who happens to fight demons for a living.
“I didn’t try to make a superhero,” explains the creator. “When I thought about doing my own character, my first thought was, ‘Well, let me play to my strengths. People like it when I do Batman. Let me make a Batman type.’ And I realized it didn’t seem real. So I got in Hell … making exactly the kind of book I wanted to make without thinking about the commercial elements. If I was thinking about the commercials, I probably wouldn’t have given the guy a tail and the name ‘Hellboy’. But I just wanted something out there that was clean, so that when I went back to work at DC Comics — or wherever — I could look back and say, “At least I did something once that was clean. It’s just made of everything I like.’ I think the fact that I put in everything I love, about movies and monsters and folklore and mythology, made it a rich book. But I also think about the fact that I wrote Hellboy as a [regular] type and not as a carbon copy of some other commercial comic made it original.”
A US debut for Hellboy: The Crooked Man has yet to be confirmed by Ketchup Entertainment, which secured distribution rights last September.
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