Hell ... inside and out

Tonight we watched Hellboy on DVD while outside the weather was suitably hellish with thunder and 18.1mm of rain in an hour, a new record for our weather station! Admittedly it's only been tracking weather since 1st January 2005 but it's still impressive and it's the second time the record has been broken this summer, July being the last.

Anyway, back to the movie. You may remember me raving about Pan's Labyrinth recently. Well Hellboy is directed by the same bloke, Guillermo del Toro (he also wrote the screenplay) and that, plus the excellent reviews for the sequel (which is cinemas now) had lead us to get this one.

In truth it should not have been our sort of movie at all: a preposterous plot and unlikely superheroes battling with equally unlikely baddies but somehow it just worked. It was so well executed that you just accepted the comic book world del Toro has created which his characters inhabit and the events that unfold all seem perfectly normal. Ron Perlman as the eponymous Hellboy is superb and there's some good supporting performances too from Selma Blair, Doug Jones¹, and Rupert Evans.

And there's some nice comic touches and a romance just to add some spice.

I can't wait for Hellboy II: The Golden Army to make it to DVD now.

1. As aquatic gill equipped superhero Abe Sapien, so yet again you don't to see his real face: he also played both the faun and the pale man in Pan's Labyrinth.