HELLBOY: The Crooked Man (2024) adapts one of the comic-book series best stories, in which Hellboy (Jack Kesy), in Appalachia in the 1950s, helps out Tom Ferrell (Jefferson White), who long ago dabbled in witchcraft and wound up losing his soul to Satan’s local collector, the Crooked Man (Martin Bassindale). Can Hellboy and Tom beat a black magician who can summon living witches and the tormented dead to fight for him?
This expands the story by having Hellboy and BPRD Agent Bobbie Jo Song (Adeline Rudolph) transporting a demon spider back to headquarters. It busts out, lured by the occult power in the Crooked Man’s neighborhood, so they have to get off the train and hunt it down. Happily it doesn’t feel too tacked on. Overall this lacks the star-power of the Ron Perlman version but I thoroughly enjoyed it. “Who builds an access tunnel to Hell in the middle of the woods?”
WALLACE AND GROMMIT: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is a sequel to The Wrong Trousers wherein the sinister duck Feathers McGraw is locked up in the local zoo’s maximum security section. That leaves Wallace free to come up with his newest, greatest invention, a robot garden gnome that will take over all of Gromit’s gardening duties (which he rather enjoys, actually). Fortunately there’s zero chance Feathers could get to a computer and reprogram the gnome for evil … right?
In many ways, this reminded me of Magnus, Robot Fighter as they share common themes that we shouldn’t let machines do all the work for us and just maybe we should be wary of the robot uprising. Regardless, this was a lot of fun as this series always is. “That’s just an innocent nun out for a pleasure cruise.”
NIGHT BITCH (2024) stars Amy Adams in an amazing performance as a married artist who’s put her career on hold to raise her parent. She’s frustrated by how narrow her world is, frustrated her husband doesn’t seem to care or want to help — only now she’s growing a tail, fur and fangs, dogs in heat are turning up at her door …
This reminds me a lot of Up the Sandbox, another movie with a frustrated mom with a neglectful husband sliding into fantasy sequences that are hard to make sense of and where the movie’s greatest strength is its central performance. “I just killed our cat.”
All rights to images remain with current holders. Hellboy cover by Richard Corben, Magnus cover by Russ Manning.
