A new live-action vision of Hellboy will be coming to our screens soon, a franchise reboot called Hellboy: The Crooked Man that has been directed by Crank‘s Brian Taylor from a screenplay by Chris Golden and Hellboy comic book creator Mike Mignola. A few weeks ago, we got a look at a teaser trailer for the film, and while a release date has not yet been announced, the finished film has received a rating from the Motion Picture Association ratings board. Hellboy: The Crooked Man has been rated R for some violent content, language and nudity.
The 2019 Hellboy movie, directed by Neil Marshall and starring David Harbour as the title character, was also rated R, but the theatrical cuts of director Guillermo del Toro’s films Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008), which starred Ron Perlman as Hellboy, were PG-13. An unrated director’s cut of the first movie was released on home video.
Hellboy: The Crooked Man will see Hellboy and a rookie BPRD agent stranded in 1950s rural Appalachia. There, they discover a small community haunted by witches, led by a local devil with a troubling connection to Hellboy’s past: the Crooked Man. In the comic, The Crooked Man was an eighteenth-century miser and war profiteer named Jeremiah Witkins who was hanged for his crimes yet returned from Hell as the region’s resident Devil.
Hellboy is played this time around by Jack Kesy, who played Black Tom Cassidy in Deadpool 2. Kesy is joined in the cast by Jefferson White of Yellowstone as Tom Ferrell and Adeline Rudolph of the Netflix Resident Evil series as Bobbie Jo Song. According Hellboy.Fandom, Tom Ferrell is a character from the comic books who “was born around 1923 in the Appalachian mountains near the Hurricane (an area locals try to avoid) to a mother we know little of and his father, Charles E. Ferrel, who had a habit of drinking in the back woods. His early misadventures with witchcraft led to a self-imposed exodus.” Tales from the Collection adds that the story will introduce parapsychologist Bobbie Jo Song, who is tasked with delivering a spider to the BPRD but must seek Hellboy’s help when things go awry. Together, they travel to Appalachia to take on the Crooked Man, who has been sent back to Earth to collect souls for the devil.
Millennium Media producer Les Weldon told us this is “a true, dark, DARK, in the style of the comic book take on it. There’s no gloss that any of the other films had. There’s a methodical pace and a real creepiness to it.“
Are you looking forward to Hellboy: The Crooked Man? What do you think of the reasons given for the R rating? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
