Directed by Brian Taylor and released in 2024, this feels like a film to maintain rights to the Hellboy (Jack Kesy, the Strain) franchise but, whilst it gets nowhere near the fabulous first two Hellboy films, it worked better, for me, than Hellboy (2019). This sets itself in the 1950s and locates itself in Apalachia.
It was Leila who mentioned it having a specific vampiric aspect to it – thank you for that – but, before we get to it I should cover the way the film opens; Hellboy and fledgling BRPD field agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) are riding a boxcar, transporting a spider that has become possessed. Hellboy starts hearing… something… when the spider suddenly grows to a colossal size and breaks out of its dormancy. Roughly here is where we can see the budget strain as the cgi is not of the highest grade.
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| Bobbie and Hellboy |
Having the boxcar fall off the train, subsequently defeating but then losing the spider, as it escapes into mining tunnels; Hellboy concludes that there is something in both the air and soil that caused the spider to react. That something is the malignant Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale), agent of the devil, a wealthy man who was hung (hence the crooked neck) and now collects souls for the devil, getting a copper coin for each that will, eventually, make him wealthy again. As they explore, they meet Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White) who was seduced by Effie Kolb (Leah McNamara) into dealing with the Crooked Man, ran away and ended up in the army and has returned to set things right. It is with these two that we get the vampirism.
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| Leah McNamara as Effie |
Tom has been told that his mother died when he was away, and his father (Anton Trendafilov) has not been seen for some time. When Effie first confronts Tom, on behalf of the Crooked Man, she is riding a horse and gifts him to Tom, saying he is nearly spent. Tom removes the harness and it reverts back into his (dying) father’s form. So we have some hagriding and with it actual transformation of the victim to horse. The power of transformation is within the enchanted bridle. Hagriding, of course, is a form of energy vampirism. It is a brief moment in film, though at the end of the film we see that Effie has now aged, played old by Svetlana Atanasova. Presumably the defeat of the crooked man (not a spoiler, this prequels the other films) frustrated her ability to use the stolen energy to remain young.
The imdb page is here.
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon US
On Blu-Ray @ Amazon UK
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