Last night I watched the first
Hellboy. I'd caught bits and pieces of it on TV over the years but never sat down and saw the whole thing through.
Damn, that was incredible occult fantasy action. Absolutely my favorite Del Toro movie out of all I have seen. Supremely excellent casting, Ron Perlman just IS this character, and the rest of the cast is perfect in their roles. The whole Nazi occult stuff was really cool I am a huge geek about that kind of stuff if you name drop the Spear of Longinus I will squee. I appreciated how the movie almost started almost where
Raiders of the Lost Ark sort of ended with the cool supernatural setpiece. Great way to open a movie like this! Yet it wasn't just dumb action, there was character stuff and a love plot and yet not too much time was wasted, but the pacing was just right. It felt like an extremely efficient script. Some of the action was a little stiff but almost in the way that the Tim Burton
Batman movies are, it looks a little off for a movie but feels like comic book images brought to life. Del Toro has an eye for fantasy.
Scene of the movie was when the Nazi clockwork experiment gets up from the operating table and moves to put on his gear. Just insanely creepy and great use of framing and blocking. You don't really get a good look at the guy, and that makes it all the creepier. This is the kind of old school filmmaking technique you rarely see these days. I read that he tried to hire Harryhausen to advise on special effects, but he turned it down because of the violence. Honestly, I found even that pretty tasteful, and I am a super whim when it comes to gore. But you can see that Del Toro is really influenced by that old pulpy b-movie style, much like George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg used to do.
Shame they never made a third. I still need to watch the sequel to this. Great stuff!