Hellboy is swell, boy!

I'm only mildly ashamed to admit that I have spent uncountable hours of my life watching the DVD of Guillermo del Toro's 'Hellboy.' Maybe, when I look back on my life and wistfully regret never having time for the 'Illiad' or Kahil Gibran, I'll rethink guzzling a forty and putting Hellboy in the DVD player for the 857th time.

Yeah, right. Non je ne regrette rien motherfucker!

I think it pretty much owns the comic book movie world. And the DVD has enough extras to choke a horse. Good ones too.

So my expectations for 'Hellboy II: The Golden Army' were high. But I was still a bit leery. It's a sequel and we all know how that can go - it's either feast or famine. For every 'Godfather II' you get a 'Spiderman 3' or 'Herbie Goes to Kazbiekastan.'

And even the best sequels suffer with familiarity. Once they reveal the ham-fisted red guy with sawed-off devil nubs, you have to raise the bar even higher. Historically, this usually leads to
bringing in cute Cousin Oliver or Henry Kissinger bombing Cambodia.

'Golden Army' mostly sticks with the stuff that made the first Hellboy flick such a wild ride. Monsters and things-that-go-bump-in-the-night at every turn. There are lots of guys in rubber suits fighting like something out of Kaiju Battel. It's a nice change of pace from the usual heavy c.g.i. creatures that have taken over monster movies. Guillermo favors evil pixies and fairies this time around instead of the heavy-handed Satanic mumbo-jumbo we saw in the first flick.

Metaphysically speaking, the lack of Satanic imagery seems a bit intentional. Maybe Guillermo had some sort of religious crisis. The dude is called Hellboy for crissakes (sorry.) But I'm not sure if you would even understand the devil guy angle just from watching this movie. Well, maybe you wouldnt if they called him RED-BOY or something. And some of the elements here point to a more wicca/gaian sensibility.