Film review: True to its graphic origins

Hellboy sits at this dividing line. For those of you who have been in Canberra long enough, this is the sort of film that could have screened at Electric Shadows Friday Night Late Shows alongside Surf Nazis Must Die and Q, the Winged Serpent.

This is the latest version of Hellboy, directed by Neil Marshall with input from the writer of the Hellboy graphic novel, Mike Mignola, not the original Hellboy directed by the master of fantastic movies, Guillermo del Toro.

True to its graphic novel origins, it delivers graphic scenes of death, destruction and violence. But wait, that's not all you get and that's the issue that brings Hellboy to the juncture of truly bad and pleasurably bad.

Hellboy contains film references to everything from Gremlins, Ghostbusters, Voldemort, Lord of the Rings and King Arthur to Resident Evil, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Although he looks like a monster from the intestines of hell, hence his name Hellboy, he is at his core a naughty teenager. He's trying to find his way in the human realm as an investigator of the paranormal.

Even though Hellboy files his horns, as his human father, Professor Bloom, points out, "You don't exactly blend in." Paranormal arrives at Hellboy's doorstep by the truckload when Nimue, the Blood Queen, who was chopped into many body parts by King Arthur, is resurrected by an evil assistant.

The evil assistant wants revenge against Hellboy, Nimue wants Hellboy to be her consort and wreak havoc on the human world while Hellboy wants to reconcile himself with Bloom, who saved him from the Nazi scientist Rasputin, who summoned Hellboy from hell's maw.

That's only the beginning and should be enough to suggest whether you will judge it as terrible or terribly enjoyable. The dialogue fills us in constantly about what happened to whom and why, which is a mark of a film that has lost its way.

Hellboy ranges from gross-out violence, where giants and demons rip apart human bodies, to a repulsive, swearing, blood-thirsty pig demon who speaks in a comical British accent and comes across as comic relief. The abundance of film styles, cliches and borrowed ideas make it sloppy. The ill-conceived script needs emergency surgery.

Troma Films and director Roger Corman made low budget bad taste films that are excellent examples of B grade movies and reflect their origins honestly, while Hellboy needs to be overhauled and reconditionedto become a truly enjoyable B grade production.