And when Rasputin and his ageless Nazi love, the she-wolf Ilsa (Bridget Hodson), let loose another dangerous force on the world, the lizardlike Sammael (Brian Steele), the situation requires the reactivation of a bureau agent, Liz (Selma Blair). Liz has pyro-telekinetic abilities she can barely control, not to mention another fiery-red power she cannot contain: Hellboy, whose crush on her is as mountainous as his appetite.
When Agent Myers, a mere mortal, gets into the middle of things, he seems to be a greater immediate threat than the immortal Sammael, who is reborn as two separate Sammaels every time he's killed. There's also a greater imminent threat: the destiny that Rasputin hints for Hellboy.
It's tough to bring a comic-book character to movie life because the incestuous homage that comics pay to one another is so prevalent. The ragtag group of unwanted, neurotic heroes feels like the X-Men, and the seat of evil that Rasputin and his team occupy has been seen in a thousand B pictures. Without the idiosyncratic boldness that the original artists convey on the page -- like Mignola's art, with its Expressionist woodcut cartoonishness -- comics-based movies often only echo what's come before in narrative terms.
What distinguishes Hellboy from the pack and gives it squirmy, ferocious life is the environment that del Toro creates on screen. The movie is lubricated with a fluid, slimy menace, and the director's love of rotted, desiccated flesh and exposed, traumatized organs adds an engrossing grossness. But a contrasting vulnerability has also been slipped in, a critical addition. When Abe Sapien goes off to investigate a Sammael appearance, there's a mounting awareness of how ill suited he is to an encounter with this slavering hybrid.
And the jealous Hellboy, stalking Myers and Liz on a date, vaults from rooftop to rooftop and ends up chatting about life and love with a 9-year-old boy from whom he filches cookies and milk. And when Manning and Hellboy's gruffness come nose to nose, the tension between them melts when Manning gives his charge a paternal and accurate lecture on how to light a cigar properly.
Del Toro avidly lavishes this texture on Hellboy, giving it a kiss of distinction. It's an elegant haunted house of a picture with dread and yearning part of the eeriness. Perlman's mastery of bad-tempered volubility makes Hellboy a kind of screwball-comedy version of the Thing from the Fantastic Four comics. Like any American comedy protagonist, he's always trying to explain himself and do what's right. That ambition is what gets him into trouble and is the truest definition of hell.
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