Fairytale of doom

Fairytale of doom

THE Super Sapiens are back! Super what? You know, that 2004 movie with that big red horned dude with a stone hand, whom we last saw clobbering salivating demons and octopus-like evil entities, remember?

Ok, so his name is HELLBOY, but that WAS what his movie was inexplicably known as back then.

Fortunately, this time around he isn’t going to settle for that Super Sapien moniker anymore. And based on the trailers and the pictures we’ve seen of Hellboy II: The Golden Army, director Guillermo Del Toro is taking his fascination with the fairy world to a whole new level.

From fang-baring tooth fairies and evil elves to ugly trolls and Cloverfield-like monsters, this movie has a lot more fantastical creatures in it than the original Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth (Del Toro’s Oscar-winning film) put together.

Del Toro has always been fascinated with fairytales. “As a teenager, I read the Bruno Bettleheim essays (The Uses of Enchantment, in which Bettleheim discussed the meaning and importance of fairytales), but by then I had also read The Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen ... I had started to collect legends from all over the world,” Del Toro recalls, adding that he had never thought he would ever do a fairytale on film.

“I always thought when I grew up that I’d do crime and horror movies. I never really connected with fantasy as a genre and I still don’t. I just connect with the fairytale, which is a very specific area of the fantasy, and when we started the process on this film we were actually going to do a very different story.”

Speaking of that “different story”, it’s common knowledge by now that the story we’ll be getting in Hellboy II was never told in the comics, and it isn’t even the original story that that Del Toro and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola had pitched to the studio originally.

“We pitched the idea of somebody trying to awake the four Titans in the four corners of the Earth: Fire, Water, Wind and Earth. Then I thought, well, I’m going to have the characters on a plane all the time, going to have them all travelling, and it didn’t feel good,” said Del Toro. “So I called Mike to my house, and we changed the story to this one.”

“This one” refers to the story of one angry elf prince called Prince Nuala who leads the fairytale world in a war against the human world. Nuala aims to awaken an ancient “Golden Army” to help him, and it’s up to Hellboy and his pals at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) to stop him. In addition to the original BPRD line-up of Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) and Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) is the strange Johann Kraus, a disembodied ectoplasmic spirit who can only maintain a tangible physical form by wearing a containment suit.

This whole new angsty and pissed-off portrayal of fairy creatures is an idea that Del Toro is very much enamoured with.

“My idea is that fantasy is not a clean, sanitised thing. Normally, elves are beautiful; they look beautiful and they have perfect teeth, but here they are kind of nasty,” he said. “The tooth fairies in the movie are nasty little creatures. Everything is grimy, slimy, nasty, dirty, used and smelly. I like that. I like the idea of fantasy not being the sort of perfect Disney-esque clean-land!”

Del Toro’s view is not one shared by his star Ron Perlman though, who would much rather leave all the reading and research to his good friend, and just concentrate on enjoying his return to one of his most iconic roles.

“I could spend endless time just exploring Hellboy’s role. I’d never get bored or tired of it. He’s dear to me for his humanity and personality and idiosyncrasies,” said Perlman. “As for what he does that’s for the storytellers to devise. But I am taking credit for all of the action, which quite honestly, is probably the first Hellboy to the power of ten!”

The classically trained Perlman boasts a career spanning over three decades, starring in critically acclaimed movies such as Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Academy Award-winning film The Quest for Fire, and The Name of the Rose. Among his other films are Sleepwalkers (1992), del Toro’s Cronos (1993), and Alien: Resurrection (1997).

Perlman has no doubt that Hellboy II will be bigger than the first movie. “It’s got a real epic feeling to it. The sets are magnificent and unbelievable; and I feel as though we have a really strong set of characters,” he said. “There’s also an operatic quality to the time that Guillermo is taking on each sequence. The visual way that the sequences are playing is incredibly noticeable to all of us, and I think it’s just beautiful and very cool.” Although he probably spends most of the movie battling fairy creatures and beating up elf princes, that’s not the only action Hellboy is getting into – he is also in a relationship with the fiery (in the literal sense of the word) pyrokinetic Liz Sherman, and that makes for a more er... emotionally-sensitive Hellboy.

“The character of Hellboy in the first one was basically all swagger and wisecracks. He was not particularly a slave, emotionally, to anything, other than the love to live,” explains Perlman. “But now, in the second film, he’s in a relationship with Liz and they are having a lot of trouble, a lot of trouble being girlfriend and boyfriend. He is really screwed up over that!

“He’s a little emotional, so it’s a different exercise for me; while it’s the same guy, it’s clearly a different side of him you did not see in him in the first piece.”

Besides that, there is little else that is different with Hellboy this time around other than the fact that he has a much, much bigger gun. “In the first one he has the Good Samaritan, which was a pretty big gun; but he has one here which is four times as big! It’s a big baby!” said Perlman, adding that the makeup and the rubber suit were not much different this time around either.

“To the naked eye he looks exactly the same but there are tiny little subtle differences. I think he looks cooler, younger. He’s hot!” he said. “The make-up also has no trouble showing whatever it is I am feeling. That’s an alchemy there that I don’t quite understand ? I’m wearing rubber and rubber is an inanimate object and yet all I have to do is to feel a little confused about something and you can see I’m confused. It mirrors exactly what I’d be doing normally if I were wearing no makeup. How do they do that?”


Hellboy II: The Golden Army comes to Malaysia in July.