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By: Martyn Pedler
Date: 25th Aug 08
Format: Cinema
Mood: Epic
What:
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army
When:
Opens August 28
Where:
Hoyts Melbourne Central
Watch the trailer:
Here
Win:
We have 3 dbl passes to give away! To enter, email win@threethousand.com.au with the subject line 'Oh, crap'
In Hellboy, Guillermo Del Toro finds the big red muse that lets his artsy aesthetics and blockbuster tendencies combine into a glorious mess of pulp fiction.
Pan's Labyrinth? The Devil's Backbone? Blade 2, even? Del Toro only has one story, but tells it with such heartfelt glee and attention to detail that no one minds. It's the conflict between imagination and the horrors of the everyday - here, the forgotten creatures of folklore at war with the drudgery of our "parking lots and shopping malls".
Mike Mignola's long-running and near-perfect Hellboy comics draw on a complicated web of popular culture - and this adaptation skips even more schizophrenically between its genres, moods, and influences. Your reward for keeping up? A mash-up of B-grade creature features, buddy-cop-style comedy, tortured romance, drunken singalongs, old-school man-or-monster Marvel pathos, and fantasy scenes worthy of Jim Henson.
And holding it all together in his enormous rocky fist is Ron Perlman's Hellboy: a larger-than-life iconic everyman, glowing red, anchoring everything Del Toro throws at him with a resigned "Oh, crap."