If you like your movies inspired by comic books -- and who among us does not -- then Hellboy is quite the little treat. Little, because no one's brain is in the slightest danger of being taxed -- audiences can safely press a collective pause button on any cranial function. But it's a treat because, making no apologies for the source material, director Guillermo del Toro lets his picture gorge on power bars of pop energy, sugared with sprinkles of playful humour, and, at least twice, laced with a visual style so piercingly keen that horror morphs into beauty. Not bad for a pulpy outing.
Borrowing from the gothic jottings and drawings of Mike Mignola, the script starts with a quick return to the genesis of things. There, forgo the popcorn and come equipped with an industrial crane -- you'll need it to suspend your disbelief. The time is 1944; a gang of uber-Nazis have gathered in (of all places) Scotland, their numbers swelled by (of all people) Rasputin. Cue some blather about "the seven gods of chaos" and a "portal" in the firmament, through which, after abundant labour pains disguised as special effects, Mother Space gives birth to the cutest little red monster. Heck, say hi to Hellboy.
Luckily for the fate of our tiny planet, the tyke falls into the hands of the Allies. Under the tutelage of his adopted father (John Hurt in an Einsteinean fright wig), he's fed a steady diet of sweet Baby Ruths and sound Western values, a fortuitous bit of nurturing that whisks the hell out of Hellboy and allows him to grow into a more-or-less heavenly creature. That brings us to time present, and the creature to the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defence, a high-tech cavern where his job description is basically this: the good monster who makes regular outings to fight the bad monsters.
Here, much of the fun comes from watching Ron Perlman -- a veritable Brando of the beastly set -- clamber up from under the mounds of latex and emote. Admittedly, the latex itself makes for a fetching spectacle. His skin-tone? A shade approximating the effects of spending an eternity in the July sun without your Coppertone 30. Head? A balding pate, adorned with rough sideburns, a black goatee and a pair of horns that -- for vanity's sake -- Hellboy keeps cut short and filed smooth, giving them the truncated look of sliced pepperoni. Limbs? Unexceptional, save for a grotesque hunk of granite that passes for a left arm and works as a potent sledgehammer. Tail? Long, red, and becomingly delicate.
So buried, using only his eyes to act, Perlman performs miracles with this red-hued, blue-collar monster. Not so much on the job, where his battles with a recurring nemesis -- a giant squid-like critter that appears to have wiggled in from a Jules Verne novel -- get tediously repetitious. But in his leisure time, it's a hoot to watch Hellboy relaxing with his favourite things: buckets of chili, barrels of flapjacks, six-packs of Bud, half-chewed stogies, cuddly kittens and Liz. Yes, Liz the love interest who, since she's played by Selma Blair, gives the proceedings a little Beauty-and-the-Beast poignancy -- a state of amorous affairs with which Perlman (remember his TV series) has had considerable practice. Does that mean Liz is simply normal, no para? Almost, except for a certain "pyro-kinetic" tendency. When stirred to anger, she literally breathes fire -- happily, to the forgiving Hellboy, that just makes her a hot number.
The Mexican-born del Toro (who counts Cronos and The Devil's Backbone on his résumé) directs this smorgasbord with zest and panache, adroitly side-stepping the twin hazards of the comic-book adaptation: inflationary earnestness at one extreme, deflationary camp at the other. Better yet, check out two brief sequences where mere panache makes a quantum leap into artistic dazzle. Both involve the dead. The first is a funeral scene, in a heavy rain, where the borne coffin emerges from a silken sea of black umbrellas -- lasting no more than 20 seconds, it's a gorgeous shot, the sombre flip side of that famous opening to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. The second occurs in a graveyard, during the frigid winter, when Hellboy coaxes a skeletal corpse from a crypt, and the resurrection unfolds within a snow globe of falling white flakes. However fleeting, each sequence is a delicious reminder of what draws us back to the genre -- to have our fears exorcised, to see in the flaming beast of horror a redemptive flicker of beauty.