Ron Perlman

The Hellboy Reboot

Peter Germany Comic Books, Horror, Movies, Podcasts , , , , , , , , , ,

If you haven’t heard, we’ve got a Hellboy reboot in the works and it sounds like it’s quite advanced. Let’s roll back a little though, I loved Guillermo del Toro’s two Hellboy films. I think Ron Perlman rocked it as Hellboy and I’m still quite pissed off that we never got that third and final film. It’s been clear for some time though that it’s just not going to happen.

The reboot. When I first heard about this I wasn’t overly interested. I hadn’t really checked out the articles, but I do that at times. I can leave something a few days before looking into it. Sometimes I just need to see something at the right time for me to check it out and last night I think it was the right time. I was on Facebook and I saw that it had a title, Rise of the Blood Queen. Now for whatever reason that triggered some attention in my brain and I clicked the link to MoviePilot and did the reading. This is where it got my attention. Now, some of these details might change, it is something to do with Hollywood after all. But the article says that Mike Mignola, who created Hellboy, is writing it, along with Andrew Crosby and Christopher Golden. I’m not familiar with Crosby but I listen to the Three Guys with Beards podcast thats on the Project Entertainment Network, and Golden is one of the beards along with Jonathan Mayberry and James A. Moore, and I like the man. He seems to know his shit and talks passionately about what interests him.

Directing duties is down to Neil Marshall, who I like as a director. Dog Soldiers and The Descent are two films which I really like, and Doomsday is a movie that still resonates with me quite strongly.

The man playing Hellboy is David Harbour. I’m not hugely familiar with him, I’ve only watched the first episode of Stranger Things so far but with him being named as Hellboy I’m going to get back into it once I’ve finished Sense8 season two. If they’ve cast him though I’m assuming he’s impressed with what he’s done behind the scenes.

Both Marshall and Harbour have got a tough job on their hands, but I admire both of them for taking this on. That gives me confidence in this.

I’ve got a feeling this is going to stick closer to the comic book Hellboy. I’m sure everyone is looking at Marvel and seeing how it’s working out for them and thinking that’s a good way to go. By doing that the fans are getting respected, then it’s just figuring out the balance to make it appeal to the non-comic book fans.

It’s going to be R-Rated as well, so I’m interest to see how that’ll affect the tone of the movie. I really need to get some Hellboy comics and check them out

I’ll be keeping a closer eye on this now, it’s got my attention and I hope they get it right because I’d like more Hellboy please.

Movie Monday: Pacific Rim

Peter Germany Movie Monday, Movie Review, Movies, Sci-Fi , , , , , , , , , , ,

It’s been a while so I thought I’d write a Movie Monday post! Now how do I do one of these again…….lol

This Movie Monday post is all about Pacific Rim. The new movie by Guillermo del Toro where giant aliens on the scale of Godzilla are coming out of a portal at the bottom of the pacific and tearing cities apart. To solve this problem humanity came up with giant robots that are controlled by two pilots through neural pathways (I’ll admit I need to watch a couple of the details to be clear on them) this means the pilots are totally in sync with each other and feel the pain when the mechs are damaged by the Kaijus which come from the pacific. The film focuses on the attempt to shut this portal for good.

Now to me this sounded like Heaven! It has giant monster battling with giant mechs, not robots as I called them earlier (I can make excuses for wrong description 😛 ). What more could a geek like me want? A decent storyline for one and Pacific Rim has it. It’s not overly complicated which is good. The characters feel well developed and their back stories are dealt with well. Charlie Hunnam is very likeable as the lead but has great support from the deep Idris Elba, Ron Perlman, who looks like he had a lot of fun with this role and I especially liked Rinko Kikuchi who looked to have a lot of strength on screen. Burn Gorman and Charlie Day both deserve a mention as scientists who have differing opinions on the Kaiju.

The effects were great. All these battles were obviously CGI but not once did I think this was CGI because it was done that well. I would have preferred more of the action to have been in the daylight but that’s a minor quibble.

One thing I would like to mention is that this did not feel like a del Toro movie. I don’t mean that in a bad way but with del Toro you know what you as going to get and this surprised me because he’s taken a chance and pushed himself to do something that maybe is not in his safe zone. It has the depth that we expect and the right amount of humour with seriousness. The action scenes were just the right amount. Quite often I’m left feeling a little short changed with movies that have these sorts of CGI but Pacific Rim gave just the right amount of action.

All in all its a movie I really enjoyed and I will be buying the DVD when it comes out. If I’m honest I could quite easily go and watch it again at the cinema 🙂

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I would just like to make a quick mention about the 3D in this movie. I’m generally not a huge fan of 3D because it rarely compliments the movie. The best example of good 3D that I have experienced was the movie Dredd and this is probably the best use of 3D I’ve seen in a movie since then.