The second in the series, Hellboy II, unlike most sequels, doesn’t waste time explaining how the first one ended. This one starts all over again and shows you how Hellboy was discovered and developed into a very secret weapon. Director Guillermo del Toro, who in my mind is the most imaginative (along with the guys at Pixar) filmmaker around today, makes the most that he can from a very limited story. Hellboy (the terrific Ron Pearlman) is a lot of fun to watch, as are his bizarre collection of colleagues, who battle a phantasmagorical array of creatures… my favorite being the little flesh eating tooth fairies. In fact, what makes this a better film than the first installment is that del Toro has now mixed in a lot of the magic from his Spanish horror films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone. This really lifts the film out of the ordinary. It also contains some great touches such as a German robot-looking and sounding like Erich von Stroheim in La Grande illusion and a very drunk Hellboy crooning along to Barry Manilo. But with all this, the movie just didn’t excite me. Maybe it’s just that I have had it up to here with these monsters smashing and bashing each other to oblivion it’s now getting boring. But that said, it is still worth seeing especially for the creatures and the sets. It’s just that it didn’t really linger in my mind after the screening like say Batman or Iron Man. 

By Stanley Selwyn