Questions and Contemplations

Nerd Up: Hellboy II’s Monster Madness

By Scott Brown and Brian Raftery

Each week during the summer movie season, Wired writers and movie nerds Scott Brown and Brian Raftery fire up their instant-messaging clients and do a tag-team critique of a new flick. Sort of like Siskel and Ebert, but geekier and funnier. Like Statler and Waldorf but, you know, non-Muppet.

This week, Brown (Statler76) and Raftery (Waldorf75) have a devilishly good time digging into Hellboy II: The Golden Army. (Read Wired.com’s Hellboy II review.)

Statler76: hellboy’s nominally about eco-terrorist elves making war on feckless mankind, with hellboy — the dudely, irascible son of Lucifer — as our last line of defense. But really, it’s about monsters. Waldorf75: at some point, guillermo del toro is going to have to explain his errant eyeball fixationWaldorf75: he must make the creepiest sock puppets of all time Waldorf75: with googly eyes on the front chin Statler76: His boyhood bedroom must’ve looked like hieronymus bosch’s. Statler76: But with less stereoscopic vision.

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(Spoiler alert: Minor plot details follow.)

Statler76: Does del toro have children? Statler76: SHOULD he have children? Statler76: Or even impressionable tumors? Waldorf75: i dunno. but the “troll market” scene accomplished something i hadn’t seen in a sci-fi/fantasy movie in years: monsters that didn’t look like mashups of bigger, more successful monsters Statler76: Yes! Waldorf75: i feel like most of the CGI-era creatures are 50 percent velociraptor, 25 percent cockroach and 25 percent Godzilla, with a little bit of roger ailes thrown in there. Statler76: Whereas del Toro’s monsters seem to grow spontaneously, like, well, cancer. He’s got an original eye, that Guillermo. The one that’s actually focused on something. Statler76: It’s that other eye, the wandering eye, that i wonder about. Waldorf75: how so, me hearty? Statler76: I enjoyed this movie, but I will say: there are drawbacks to comic-book storytelling. Statler76: This movie is more splash-panel than actual, propulsive narrative. Statler76: I mean, I love a hero who just hangs out and kills a sixer of Tecate while there’s a deadly, warmaking elf on the loose … Statler76: but I guess I’m just not sure what the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense’s chartered for … random supernatural cleanup in the New York metropolitan area? With no follow-up? Waldorf75: when he quits working for the government at the end, i thought, “wait, why is he even with them to begin with?” Statler76: excellent question. Statler76: I mean, in the first one, he had Professor Broome, his father figure. Who wouldn’t feel loyal to cuddly, avuncular John Hurt? Statler76: On the other hand: what supernatural being in his right mind would work for Jeffrey Tambor?Statler76: And without good dental, clearly?