Eye Candy #107 - "Hellboy 2 - The Golden Army"

Hellboy 2 - The Golden Army: Of the recent slew of comic book movies, Hellboy remains the one that holds truest to its source material about the son of the Devil, helping fight paranormal monsters from around the world and throughout folklore. And while I don’t think we’ve seen the definitive “Hellboy” movie yet, I do think we’ve had two solid go-rounds courtesy of Guillermo “Muerto Los Ninos” Del Toro. What you have to realize is that both of the movies aren’t really serious supernatural horror movies. They are actually closer to young adult romantic comedies (the second moreso than the first), just instead of the insecure young woman and the high school jock, you have an insecure pyrokinetic and her giant demonic boyfriend. This time around, elven Prince Nuada (del Toro regular Luke Goss) of an underground realm of fairy creatures, decides to end a truce between his people and humanity and wants to raise the Golden Army, an army of thousands of unstoppable metal golems, to fight for him and crush mankind. Opposed to him is the BPRD crew of Hellboy (Ron Perlman), Liz (Selma Blair), and Abe (Doug Jones, not dubbed over in this one), along with new member Johann Krauss (voiced by Family Guy’s Seth McFarlane) to stop that from happening, even if it means doing so for a ungrateful public that is scared of them. Some good action set pieces and a solid sense of humor (and sufficient use of Barry Manilow) help keep this one entertaining through its 2-hours-plus run time. Liked the addition of the animated set-up story from the beginning of the film that was in the style of creator Mike Mignola. A big leap visually from the last film, but not really for kids. Woodchuck sez, “Me likey.”