When Things Go Bump In The Night...

Sometimes there's someone to bump back.

Yay! Guillermo Toro is back doing Hellboy ΙΙ: The Golden Army and I'm bouncing with glee! Yippity yippity yippity...

http://www.hellboymovie.com/

If you enjoyed Pan's Labyrinth (El Laberinto del Fauno), you should go see all of Guillermo's other movies because they are better than 90% of what's coming of of Hollywood. I saw The Orphanage (El Orfanato) just over a month ago and it was one of the best movies ever. Why do you have to see a movie out of France, Japan, or Mexico to really be impressed nowadays? Pixar is doing pretty good, yet I sometime wish they'd do something rated R or NC-17 (not that anyone allows their movies to be rated NC-17 anymore). Anyhoo, this next installment of the Hellboy movies has Johann Kraus in it! Ja?... Ja!

Go here for Guillermo's IMDb.com profile:
http://imdb.com/name/nm0868219/

I love the Hellboy Franchise, it's the mind-child of artist Mike Mignola that had supposedly started as a doodle with a permanent marker on the inside of the bathroom stall of the short lived San Francisco Comic Relief. I did the accounting for a while at the Berkeley Comic Relief, down in the lower depths of The Second Hobbit Bookstore. I'll discuss that some other day though.

Anyhoo, back to Hellboy; when Mike Mignola does his stories, he researches and include all kinds of really old folklore, the kind which the Catholic Papacy tried to destroy with their missionary crusades. Luckily, the stories were recycled and still live on so people like Mignola can give them voice again in his B.P.R.D. universe. Mike uses the old legends as a step stone and then creates all new stories with Hellboy as the foil to spin tales when homo sapiens were a minority and pawns in the struggles between wrestling forces throughout the world.

Plus; Hellboy fights Nazi-cyborg-gorillas and other Nazi occultists! How kule is that?

One of the best parts about the Hellboy graphic novels/comics is that they stick to a limited defined range of hues for the colour palette. It's a good idea, because when you limit an artist, they have to get creative with how they use the limitations creatively. This is why I think Episodes IV to VI of Star Wars are so much better than the prequels since George got to do whatever he wanted in the recent trilogy and the plot suffered for it. The actors seemed too busy placing themselves in position for the green-screen instead of character development.

If you enjoy Gothic-Lovecraft-ish and/or Steam-Punk: You should also check out The Amazing Screw-On Head which is about a... Umm... Head, that screws onto robotic steam-driven bodies and does special work for Abe Lincoln.

The Sc-Fi Channel did a test pilot episode to see if they wanted to make a series out of it. The DVD is out for about $9 USD, yet no news if there will ever be a series; which starred Paul Giamatti, David Hyde Pierce & Molly Shannon. Here's the trailer to wet your appetite:



Oh and...
   Go, SPEED RACER! GO!   
I just wish the actors flapped their jaws as an effect and the lines were delivered in ADR. It'd be soooo much better that way.