Monday, April 05, 2004

Last night Geoffrey and I went to see Hellboy. Movie tickets are up to $10.25, and of course Boston has too many colleges to make student discounts a workable proposition. This means that I have one more movie in the budget this month (maybe), even though Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dawn of the Dead, and the upcoming Kill Bill Volume 2 are all begging to be seen. Augh!

But back to Hellboy, which we saw with a whooping and vivacious fanboy audience of teen and college-age guys who applauded raucously when the credits appeared: it's definitely worth seeing if you like comics, drily humorous action heroes, or giant Lovecraftian tentacle monsters. The plot was not as confusing as some reviewers made it out to be. How hard is it to imagine that the Nazis would ask Rasputin to summon powers from Hell at the end of the war in a last ditch to defeat the Allies, resulting in the emergence of a red baby demon with a stone hand and the mysterious disappearance of Rasputin, his Eva Braun lookalike girlfriend, and an immortal Nazi ninja-style assassin? Come on, people!

The movie also has a sped-up cover of Nick Cave's Red Right Hand, which pleased me.

Update: two interviews with Guillermo Del Toro, the director. Bad news: Hollywood suits wanted to give Hellboy a red hellhound pet and a Hellmobile. Good news: the exchange between Hellboy and his love interest is taken directly from Del Toro's courtship of his wife. Aww. What woman would not want such things lovingly immortalized on film (even if your husband's part is played by a huge red demon)?
blog comments powered by Disqus