(REVIEW) “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” is a surprisingly funny crime/horror film that embraces a shocking amount of Christian faith in its story.

Hellboy is an odd character with an uneven cinematic history. Based on a comic book series written by Mike Mignola, Hellboy is the son of a demon and a witch who were brought from Hell to the world by Nazis. He was rescued and raised by Professor Broom of the BPRD (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) who became his surrogate father and trained to help save the world from monsters just like him.

The character has been filmed several times before. Twice in live-action by Guillermo del Toro (“Hellboy” in 2004 and “Hellboy II: The Golden Army”), in what would become a planned trilogy. However, the modest box office sales of these films made the studio choose to turn to a reboot of the franchise in 2019 with a film called “Hellboy” that was an even bigger critical and commercial flop than its predecessors.

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Now Hellboy has returned to the screens, but on a much more modest scale of $20 million (previous budgets were $66 million for “Hellboy,” $85 million for “Hellboy II: The Golden Army” and $50 million for “Hellboy, 2019”) the film contains far fewer monsters, characters, fight scenes and a shorter running time (1 hour 39 minutes). While the other films received theatrical releases worldwide, this one was released in UK cinemas but sold out direct to digital in USA.

“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” follows the titular hero as he and a new field agent find themselves caught in the crossfire between townspeople and witches after a routine mission goes awry. Things take a turn for the worse when they encounter “The Crooked Man”, an undead servant of the devil who grants people wishes in exchange for their souls.

You can definitely see the trimming of the budget in the film. The number of monsters portrayed and the quality of the effects are much closer to a CW show or a high-caliber fan film on YouTube than a Hollywood blockbuster. Far from weakening the film, these changes have somehow made one of the better Hellboy projects. This movie cuts away a lot of the fat that can distract from Hellboy’s core appeal and focuses on what actually makes him cool and unique.

Hellboy – at its core – is a crime procedural set in a horror movie universe with one of the monsters on the side of the good guys. Like “Jaws,” “The Crooked Man” focuses on the monsters’ terror in the dark and leads up to their attacks on the heroes, making the horror elements stronger. When Hellboy starts fighting the monsters, it feels earned and deserved. And since they’re not trying to fit five different emotional arcs into Hellboy, the most interesting one (him struggling with his evil instincts and parentage) comes into clearer focus. The film is really able to rest on the genre tropes that make the concept so strong, rather than distract from them. The grizzled old cop and the rookie; the hero and the villain; the sinner and the saint.

Of course, while the budget constraints work most of the time, they don’t always. Some bad CGI is noticeable and some shot choices are distracting. In one scene, they have Hellboy do the same motion of puffing on his cigar every time they cut back to him.

At the same time, the most interesting thing about “The Crooked Man” is how Christian it is. Christians tend to be turned off by characters like Hellboy because they seem to make demons (the bad guys in the Bible) into good guys. Similar to the fear of Harry Potter involving children in witchcraft, Christians have stayed away from such film series. And while that’s true to some extent, it’s more complicated than that. In the “Hellboy” movies, demons and monsters are the bad guys. And Hellboy’s demon heritage is a source of pain for him. In that sense, Hellboy has always affirmed the evil of demons and monsters.

But previous films also emphasized how monsters are misunderstood and the people who hunted them were to some extent the real villains. In “The Golden Army” we learn that humans and fantasy creatures lived together in harmony until the greedy humans tried to take over everything and started the war between humans and elves (and other mythical creatures). And it was the elves, according to the movie, who stopped the war out of compassion for the humans.

Likewise in 2019’s “Hellboy” reboot humans and monsters lived in harmony until humans betrayed them.

Both films also show how ordinary people hate and fear Hellboy and monsters like him. This creates a tension: Should he really side with the humans? Or become king of monsters where people will respect him?

There is also little acknowledgment in previous “Hellboy” films that Christianity is a force (let alone the main force) that can fight these dark enemies. The heroes who stand against “the things that go to war in the night” are government entities that fight against monsters, a combination of science and the very powers of magic they often fight against.

“Hellboy: The Crooked Man” gives no such moral high ground to demonic creatures. In “The Crooked Man” the villains are the devil and those who have chosen to serve him. Satan is unequivocally evil. And none of his servants, like The Crooked Man and Elfie, are portrayed as unjustly persecuted. These people are not evil because people fear and hate them. People fear and hate them because they are evil. Rather, the moral complexity comes from the fact that the temptation to evil they have fallen into exists in the heroes as well.

This is especially noticeable when they depict witches and sexual sin. It is popular today to portray witches – or people accused of being one – as the good guys and the bad guys are the Christians who burn them. Likewise, it is popular to portray Christians as oppressive prudes for being against sleeping around. But the film unironically portrays witchcraft as an evil that turns people over to Satan and slavery (with one exception, which I’ll discuss below). And it uncritically portrays “fornication” as somehow binding you to the devil’s control. They even combine these elements by using the trope of the witch as a sexual temptress – something that is often condemned as a sexist projection on the part of men.

This means that Hellboy’s arc is less about being a misunderstood victim of human intolerance and more about fighting against his own sinful nature. This fits into stories that are much closer to the heart of traditional Christian teaching. Christianity teaches that we are all born sinners and must fight against our sinful nature every day. Hellboy was literally born the son of a witch and the devil. And yet he wants to be a good person. How does he do what’s right when his instincts literally come from hell? This is reminiscent of what St. Paul said: “For the good I want I do not do, but the evil I do not want I do. … O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (Romans 7:19, 24, KJV version).

Hellboy is also a particularly male expression of this problem. As Nancy Pearcy points out in “The Toxic War on Masculinity,” Western Christianity has associated femininity with Christian values ​​and masculinity with sinful nature since the Industrial Revolution. Jesus – and therefore Christian virtue – became associated with “gentle Jesus meek and gentle.” Therefore, men, who tend to identify more with warrior king archetypes, feel these instincts as closer to the darkness they are trying to confront. The question then is, how does Hellboy reconcile his aggressive instincts (which he needs to use to fight the monsters) with his morals, and not succumb to the dark side because of them?

In “The Crooked Man” Christianity is also taken for granted as true and powerful against this darkness. Demons and witches cannot be on church grounds. A consecrated spade with a cross emblazoned on it can destroy the demons. The blind pastor is portrayed as a good man who can resist the devil’s temptations and help fight him.

There’s only one thing that keeps this movie from being a straight movie that upholds the Christian faith. Bobby Jo Song uses a magic spell to sabotage the villains. It’s a common trope in Hellboy: The heroes use magic and so do the villains. But it is generally understood within Christianity that witchcraft is evil, as emphasized in Deuteronomy 18:9-12). That doesn’t make this a bad movie, but I have to admit that there’s a part of me that wishes I could annoyingly tell people that “The Crooked Man” was unironically a Christian movie.

It’s a fascinating trend that some of these old tropes are making a comeback. While it was full of “the bad guys are actually the good guys” stories — from vampires in “Twilight” to witches in “Wicked” and “Sabrina” — now we get movies like “Salem’s Lot” and “Nosferatu.” ” which has flipped the script.

Why? It could be something to the fact that many of these films are adapted from stories that are older. “Nosferatu,” “Salem’s Lot” and “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” are all based on stories written before the deconstructive trend that became popular in Hollywood. In this case, the obsession with recycling past material brings back old tropes that have fallen out of fashion.

I suspect it is also because the old stories still have a power and resonance that has yet to be replaced in our society. The idea of ​​demons tempting us to evil, to which we often succumb out of weakness, still resonates with our lived daily experiences. The idea of ​​the witch who has given in to that lust for power and destroyed themselves also still resonates. The idea of ​​being tempted away from the right path by someone through sexual appeal also still resonates.

While the budget often shows, and not every artistic choice works, “Hellboy: The Crooked Man” is a very enjoyable mashup of different genres that is only better for how Christian – and also how true – it is.