A superior sequel. If you found the first film lacking, as I did, it's a welcome improvement, as comics follow-ups often are (the ponderous "origins" are dispensed with); if you liked the first one, there's no reason why you won't go for this one--it's sharper, funnier, more touching (downright romantic in spots) and has a thoroughly delightful menagerie of well-characterized creatures that are far more than just CGI inserts. (The effects are excellent, and done with an old-school finesse.) Beautifully designed, it's more of a Del Toro picture, and benefits from his care--but rest assured there's no lack of whomping Hellboy action, either. Ron Perlman rocks. HELLBOY 2 drop-kicks the forgettable HULK and I found it more satisfying than IRON MAN, too. Opens July 11. Go, as I really want to see what happens in HELLBOY 3.

This is one of the films this Summer, that I am actually, genuinely psyched to see. I liked HELLBOY quite a bit, enough to promote an advanced screening when it came out.
This one looks to be even better, and even has it's own viral online game, that's been pretty amusing and nicely rewarding for fans.

Alas, it looks like it'll be a good 5-6 years before we see Big Red on the silver screen, again. But, Del Toro has mentioned an idea to bring Hellboy into the world of the Universal Monsters. Which would just be a wondrous thing to see, and very interesting, based on some feelings on where he may be going with a third movie.

I'm really looking forward to Hellboy 2. It's been my most anticipated 2008 movie for several months.

Here's a fun little Hellboy-related clip:

Hellboy on INSIDE THE ACTOR'S STUDIO

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbaA68jYYek

Wow, that is one fantastic ad!

With this film, Hellboy earns his place in the Universal pantheon (in the film, he watches BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and I think FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN clips). HELLBOY MEETS THE MONSTERS, under Del Toro's direction, would be so much better than VAN HELSING...

I should nip this little "Hellboy vs The Universal Monsters" rumor/gossip right in the bud. Much like Tarantino, del Toro loves to talk to the press and geek out about any ideas that are either in his skull or on some Hollywood deal-making table. No big surprise that many of them will never get made. But they still make their way to IMDB, all somehow in pre-production. In the case of HB vs the Monsters, del Toro was just musing about the new Universal deal, mostly with the possibility of doing such a thing in a spin-off animation DVD or comic book. But not in any live-action del Toro/Perlman movie. He has mentioned his current plans for a possible third film (God willing) but the premise is something quite different.

The two animated HB flms, especially BLOOD AND IRON, went down quite well. If there is a third HB film, and there probably will be, is it too much too hope for a couple more animated films to bridge HB 2 & 3?

Yes, true. I should have mentioned that. It sounds like Del Toro has very much a definite, and surprisingly last, HELLBOY film that's very different from a Universal monster rally. Which would still be so very cool to see.

As for animated films, last I heard in March, any further ones were on hold, but if the new movie does well enough, they can get made. There's a neat sounding idea for a new one, introducing Lobster Johnson, and I, for one, would welcome more quite happily, especially with another movie pretty far away.

Caught it tonight with Del Toro, Doug Jones & Mike Mignola in attendance. It's always a yummy surprise to see a sequel that's as good as or better than it's predecessor. Del Toro had more money and more control and you see the results on the screen. Plenty of rewatchability just to try to see something you missed several times before. Lot's of creatures, but no monsters except for the Golden Army and humanity. A somewhat sympathetic, yet cruel and remorseless (but then, he is sidhe), villain this time around.

Lot's of nice creatures including one that seemed to allude to PRINCESS MONONOKE. You'll know it when you see it. Johann worked out even better than I had hoped.

It's a movie that wear's its heart on its sleeve, especially about midway through in a scene with Hellboy, Abe and Barry Manilow. It didn't just make you want to smile, you do smile. Even with all the death and mayhem it's really a light hearted movie. There are portents, though, that the 3rd movie (providing this one does well enough) will be much darker (and more Nazis! And maybe Lobster Johson (portrayed by Bruce Campbell)!).

I managed to get in a question after the movie, so I asked about At the Mountains of Madness. Not too hopeful, sadly, but if HB2 and the HOBBITs 1 & 2 and HALO all do well enough, who's to say. The studios are all hinky about Lovecraft and rights and really unhappy endings.

It did sound like he would get around to making SATURN AND THE END OF DAYS sooner or later. Among the highlights was Del Toro demonstrating how to make a muppet (this involves tequila and a volunteer). The studio graciously payed for everyone's dinner and we all got t-shirts.

I think Doug Jones said they were heading to Muncie after this; ugh, press tours.

Oh, and the big fight at the end was between two people not two cgi behemoths (the big fight before that was between cgi people and behemoths though).

Grrrr. I couldn't find any advance screenings in Manhattan to save my life. Last time, I got to see the first one over a week in advance with Perlman and Blair popping out to say hi beforehand. What gives?

I will say that the advertising campaign for HBII has been quite impressive, just the sort of multi-leveled push the first film needed:

A very special message from Hellboy

Anung-Un-Rama. One R.

There's a bunch of other spoof ads to be found on YouTube. Even though I know almost nothing about most of the shows referenced, they're still hilarious. Gotta love Perlman.

Also saw it tonight -- without the guys in attendance, unfortunately. I thought it was fabulous, a terrific entertainment, a 21st century fairy tale (loved the Tooth Fairies) and an outstanding monster movie (I make no distinction between creatures and monsters) whose quality of imagination seemed to lend the Universal logo some of its traditional lustre. The love song scene is an instant classic.

A plethora of positive reviews:

Walter Chaw

Slate.com

Salon.com

And one with some reservations:

The House Next Door

You've also got to admire his spunk in getting this thing made at all:

New York Times

Magnificent. This is how you do it! This is how you make a super-hero summer blockbuster! What a wonderfully-crafted work! It was a pleasure just to drink in all the virtuoso camera shots. And to watch del Toro edit them all together with the style and grace of an Astaire. He is so generous with incredible visuals and gorgeous special effects, you'd think both were about to be outlawed next month. It's a banquet, a joyous feast of monsters, kung-fu weapons fighting, outrageous costumes, kaiju battles, belly laughs... and del Toro wants us all to eat 'til we burst!

I'm sure I am fairly notorious around here as a hopeless del Toro fanboy, but I really urge all Mobians to give this film a shot this weekend. It's much better than the first film, brimming with so many of the qualities Mobians yearn for in fantastic cinema.

Endless more things to discuss, but I need to see it again at least once. And so do you.

In the face of such unbridled effusion, near-apathy seems so churlish of me - but *sob*, that's the way I feel! ;)

I liked this about exactly as much as I did the first - or at least in exactly the same portions. It's a triumph of design and visual execution, ingratiating on a character level, fairly funny... and really pretty familiar narratively. Doesn't help that I tend to glaze over when things like farawayneverland kingdoms are invoked, but I found the whole Golden Army MacGuffin sorta inert.

I wish I liked Del Toro more. I wanna love his movies, but underneath all the visual imagination and thematic underpinnings, there's something not-that-adventurous about the actual plotting. I still like THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE the best, I think.

I saw it last night and enjoyed it a lot. It wipes the floor with most everything else that's out right now as far as I'm concerned. I don't want to oversell it, but I really think that the bar for fantastic filmmaking has been set a little higher now. I'll definitely be seeing it again during its theatrical run.

It does make me a little bit sad to think that, with Del Toro occupied with The Hobbit for a while, it may be a pretty long time before we get a Hellboy 3 (I think there's way too much stuff set up in this movie for there to not be a third movie). Or, worse yet, there's always the possibility that we might end up with a X-Men 3-like Hellboy 3 directed by *shudder* Brett Ratner or someone like that. At this point, I have a really hard time imagining anyone but Del Toro getting a Hellboy movie right.

SLIGHT SPOILER




There was one thing that I was wondering about that I hope someone here can answer. What exactly was the purpose of Johnann Krauss's "spacesuit?" At first, it seemed to have a life-support purpose, but after Hellboy broke the dome on the suit and his ectoplasmic "body" comes out of it, Krauss seemed to be able to survive just fine without it. Was the suit just to make him a more visually interesting character than a cloud of CGI ectoplasm?

EDIT: I checked the Wikipedia entry for Johann Krauss, and apparently he's a character from the B.P.R.D. comic books (which I haven't read). It says that without the suit, he would eventually dissipate and cease to exist. Nothing in the movie really makes that clear, and it seems like the movie version of Johann Krauss is a little bit different from the comic book version.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Krauss

I really wanted to like it, but ultimately came away with the realization that I don't find Hellboy funny, mostly because I don't find the writing funny, and with so much of Perleman's portrayal (and del Toro's writing) steeped in comebacks, insults, one liners and gags... I don't really like the character, thus... I didn't really like the movie. I literally didn't laugh once.

I was truly groaning through much of the flick, with the low point (for me) being the Manilow song. While I appreciated it thematically, with the state of both of their romantic relationships, I just thought the humor was forced, and the drunkeness of Hellboy and Abe during and after the scene was very poorly acted.

The movie was beautiful, that's for sure, and it was worth the admission price just to look at it (truthfully), but it wasn't a very enjoyable movie for me.

I just came back from it and I'm pretty lukewarm on it myself.

It looks fantastic. I think if you consider yourself any kind of buff of fantastic cinema, or heck even movies in general, it's worth seeing on the big screen just for the look of the thing. I don't know if Del Toro considers himself influenced by Jim Henson or not, but HELLBOY 2 looks like an updated, superior version of LABYRINTH, high praise from me because I really dig LABYRINTH.

I have to side with those who find Hellboy himself pretty grating, actually, and so there's that. Although I admit that's a personal thing.

My big main problem with HELLBOY 2, though, is that it's pretty twee, by which I mean something like "calculatedly pushing childhood tropes in an effort to force a sense of wonder". It's the kind of movie that screams at you to "dream, dammit!"

Del Toro flirted with tweedom in PAN'S LABYRINTH (although I thought there was all sorts of other things wrong with that picture besides that), but here it's in full force. Early example:

SPOILERS




The whole "attack by tooth fairies" thing. Great looking characters, very well done sequence for the most part (although Del Toro reveals himself as yet another director who can't shoot action all that well, see how we don't have a good picture of the layout, where characters are in relation to others, how one action affects the world, etc.). But then we have to learn that it's indeed "tooth fairies", not 'evil little bone crunching thingees', and we get a brief explanation that they come from what, third century Bavaria? The theme of "the terror of fairy tales" is thus thuddingly introduced.

Now, I have no idea if that explanation of the roots of the tooth fairy legend are true or not, neither would particularly surprise me. But it doesn't matter -- the whole introduction of this, the whole way it's presented, is really very preening and self regarding. "Look at me!" it says. "I'm playing around with childhood legends!! Do you feel a sense of wonder yet?" The whole movie works like this. The effects and the cast and the design maybe just sell it, but it left a bad taste in my mouth throughout. A movie like PAN'S LABYRINTH (or hey, even better, LABYRINTH) could do this, because the fantasy worlds were more or less metaphorical/allegorical representations of inner conflicts; the forced nature of the thing was in some way the point. Here it just, well, feels forced.

I like my fantasy to believe in itself, no matter how absurd the premises. I can swallow pretty absurd premises. But I don't like feeling manipulated.

That's why, though I'll probably see it because I like the book, I think Del Toro is completely wrong for THE HOBBIT. Tolkein is the essence of British humdrum practicality, one of the pleasures of his work is the mundaneness of it all. Plus Tolkien certainly believed it, man. Del Toro seems more natural to do one of the Narnia books, which are pretty twee in their own right and whose ragamuffin/junkyard mythos (a faun here, a witch there, a talking animal here) seems right up Del Toro's alley.

Go see it, though, by all means. The look of the thing is worth the price of admission.

doug

I was of the same opinion till I had the opportunity to talk with him about it. He has a very exciting, unusual slant on the material. I don't know if he's the right choice to make Tolkein's or anyone else's HOBBIT, but I know he's going to make one hell of a good del Toro movie of it. He even got me interested in taking another stab at reading it.

Whatever problems I may have had with it, that Forest Lord thing was pretty damn cool!

With the fantasy world created in HELLBOY 2, it's almost like he's making a case to the public that he is the right man for the job.

BTW I loved this movie. Like others have said, I don't want to build it up too much, but the movie has the action, laughs and a fantastic look. Don't miss it.

Just a footnote, my 9 year old boy lost a tooth during the tooth fairy sequence. What are the odds????


marc

Sorta strange... I was really enjoying it, but right around the time they landed in Ireland, I started thinking, "Gawd... isn't it about time to wrap this up?"

By the time the end credits rolled, I could have swore it clocked in at two-and-a-half hours.

Maybe it was the Barry Manilow that sapped my will to keep experiencing the magic.

Really enjoyed this.

Ron Pearlman makes Hellboy great, maybe it's because he sounds like a New York street guy. I love his sarcasm. Hellboy is everything that Raimi's Peter Parker should have been. That's why I loved reading Spidey as a kid.

Huh, could've sworn I posted a reply here. Oh well.


I really enjoyed this. It's better then HELLBOY, which got saddled with what seems like a few studio mandates. This time, we get pretty much unfiltered Del Toro, and everyone is the richer for it.
Beginning with a very imaginative prologue, told as a form of puppet theater, the story, while an old one, is here deepened with more fleshed out characters. Actually, they stop becoming characters and start becoming people, or being if you wish, that we care for. And Abe Sapiens, the beloved fishman, gets much more screen time here, and is wonderful. The scene with him and Big red, singing cheesy love songs and drunk on cheap beer is great. A real bonding moment for them, and for us as well.

Even the villain here is not so much a villain, but a reminder to the others, that they'll never be fully accepted into the society that they protect. His reminding humans of the past, and the reasons fr breaking the peace sorta makes everyone question why the B.P.R.D. ARE doing what they do. And things take a really interesting turn towards the end that may, or may not, lead to possibly tragic, Earth altering consequences later on.
Anyone who's ever been accused of being "weird" or felt outcast can relate to what Hellboy, Liz, and Abe, and even Prince Nuada do and feel.
And there's a LOT of humor this time. More then I expected, but the kind that anyone who's ever seen an interview with Del Toro, can understand.

Visually, it's gorgeous. The much talked about Troll Market scene is fantastic, though I'm more reminded of the fantastic montage/descent into Midian part of Clive Barker's NIGHTBREED. Both that, and this scene are much more imaginative,imho, then STAR WARS enjoyably famous cantina.

Anyone who loves imagination, and especially loves monster movies, should see HELLBOY: THE GOLDEN ARMY.

Some more thoughts as Hellboy II lies withered and crushed under the mighty boots of The Batman and this thread dies off (at least until the DVD release). I figured HBII would reap the benefits of The Dark Knight, as all those who showed up at cinemas to sold out screenings would opt for Big Red. No such luck. Opening a week before The Bat allowed HBII a single top grossing weekend before it sank like a stone. Shame.

Upon a second viewing, I am really struck by what a great special-effects film this is... especially considering it's $85 million budget! So many of the effects worked so well, I didn't even think of them as special effects. Using trampolines to fly stuntmen through the air was a ballsy move (and frankly, rather dangerous) in this era of fakey HK wirework and CGI stunts, giving these soaring comic book characters a realism you sense without being overly aware of the cheat. I can't wait to pour through the DVD extras on the making of all the creatures, so many of which were Henson-deluxe puppets and monster suits. Del Toro has said they are aiming to top the extras of the Hellboy Director's Cut box set. (Those hoping for a Part Three better pray the DVD sells through the roof.)

The opening story-telling sequence was a rather brilliant method of working around the restrictive budget. Del Toro had the whole thing planned out as realistic Lord Of The Rings montage, but the funds would have only resulted in the kind of rushed and video-gamey CGI everyone hates. Making all the CGI characters wooden puppets (Mignola-designed puppets to boot!) bounced them right out of the Uncanny Valley. Bravo!

As a fan, I can dig that del Toro likes to continually tweak concepts borrowed from his earlier films, such as an exquisitely-costumed Nazi with dark round sunglasses sporting a pocket-watch. But extent of his cribbing the main villain from Blade II was a bit much. Luke Goss plays a supernatural baddie outcast from his people, with bone white skin, pointy ears, lines on his face, martial-arts superpowers, a princely lineage to royalty, Daddy issues, a habit of questioning where the hero's loyalties should lie, an air of tragedy, and... if I asked you which film I was talking about, Blade II or Hellboy II, would you know? This didn't stop me from enjoying the film or Luke Goss' Prince Nuala, but I would have liked a little less deja-vu.

I'm really not a Family Guy fan, so it was a happy surprise just how much I enjoyed Seth McFarlane's vocal work for the Johann Krauss character. He nailed that sort of straight-laced Germanic confidence and arrogance that a guy in such a miserable physical condition would need to keep going, while at the same time constantly being hilarious. His battle cries during the locker room and Golden Army scenes still crack me up. He really earned that Young Frankenstein nod at the end. The movements and gestures of the two guys who did the Krauss suit-work were also both spot-on.

"Agent Kraut..." "That's Krauss! Kay arr ay you double-ess!" "SS...right..."
"I would die and do the dishes!" :lol:

When asked, Hellboy doesn't hold back in his opinions on Tooth Fairies. Move halfway through this interview clip, about 1:00 in:
Hellboy does press

The Art Of HBII book details the post-credits bonus scene that del Toro was forced to cut from the script before shooting, which would've been a real treat for fans of the comics and the first film. In a hidden Antarctic lair filled with mad scientist super-weapons, Kroenen's living head (in a glass jar filled with bubbling liquid, of course) is screwed on to a gigantic Republic serial robot body as the sinister ghost of Rasputin looks on. Perhaps this scene's absence is for the best though, as the chances of the sequel it promises are looking pretty slim right now.

I love what del Toro has done with Hellboy, but I really would like to see an HB film that is almost purely Mignola-esque and reflecting the weird and frightening aesthetics of the comic. Like Sin City, but with more whispering skeletons. You know, Perlman walking around alone through haunted forests and crumbling castles, occasionally throwing out barbed one-liners at various ghosts, witches, vampires, and other mythical beings... and never ever encountering New York City, exploding helicopters, or Jimmy Kimmel. I'd love it, but most of America would avoid it like the plague.

MILD SPOILERS

However, leaving the characters stranded out in the middle of Nowhere, Ireland was a step in the right direction! :D

SPOILERS END