Hellboy - the movie

The first time I saw Mike Mignola's Hellboy, it was from my brother's comic book collection.

I liked the chunky strokes. The simple lines. The sparse but detailed illustrations.
It's almost the same style like Frank Miller.


I can't remember the title of the HellBoy comic my brother had. But I remember it was that one where they went to Transylvania and hellboy got caught and was tied to a tree. And the blond woman (what's her name, Rasputin's girlfriend) was put into the iron maiden and blood was gushing out..
Anyways. I thought the comic was pretty scary. Not something I would introduce to my kids. (neither is Frank Miller's Sin City..)
So when I heard that they're making a Hellboy movie, I was of course sceptic about whether I wanted to watch it. Would it be scary? Would it be gross?
But i heard so many good reviews about it and I caught the trailer one day and I was like, "Wow. That IS Hellboy". i mean, they did a pretty good job with the makeup and action sequence in terms of making it look believable.

Last weekend I finally watched the movie. But not before I warned my kids: "This is just a movie. It is not real. They do not exist. Understand? If you're scared, close your eyes".
Thank God there weren't much f-words in this one (I didnt want the incident with Mystic River to happen again, so my thumb was ready on the mute button). But Ilham says a lot of "Crap!" nowadays.

I must say, the movie was pretty entertaining. It had a good story line, well thought out characters and great effects. Plus, the actors in this movie was all good. I felt for most of the folks, hell-born, mutant or not.
I know a lot of people have said this, but I just wanna say it myself:
RON PERLMAN IS HELLBOY.
I know the great make-up and it special effects helped. But I think his great talent and voice and experience in playing Beast (in Beauty and the Beast) also contributed in fleshing out the character. He is truly an underrated and often-ignored actor.

I think the special effects on this one was better then Hulk or Spiderman (1), where some of the jumps and leaps looked so unreal, we could see that it was fake and computer generated. maybe everything being so dark also helped.

I don't know if it's the PS2 getting to me or what, but I looked at some scenes in the movie and I was going like ,"Hey this would make a good game" . Does that ever happen to you?
A particularly good game scene would be that part when they were in rasputin's tomb, on that stone bridge and they had to run across it before a huge pendulum crushes into them.. damn. I could almost *see* how that would be played.

I hated the ending though. Somehow it was like out of place, and a bit of an anticlimax.
I expected the Gods of Doom to look more menacing then a giant octupus. Maybe something more like a Balrog or something.. I thought the Octupus looked pretty lame and awkward .. how was it going to wreak destruction into the world??

But that part when HellBoy kissed Liz and they went up in blue flames was just awesome though.
I hope it makes my kids think twice about kissing someone of the opposite sex.
heh heh..