HELLISHLY GOOD FUN

Reviewed - Hellboy: Guillermo del Toro, the talented director of Cronos and The Devil's Backbone, has done an extraordinary job here of replicating the look and spirit of Mike Mignola's comic book about a laconic demon who tracks down less well-behaved monsters for the FBI. The colours have an appropriate chalky dullness, the dialogue stays just the right side of camp and the performances are, considering the film's many fantastic turns, admirably grounded.

Indeed, del Toro, who even reproduces individual frames from Mignola's work, may have delivered the most obsessively realised movie adaptation since The Passion of the Christ.

The film begins with a terrific wartime sequence in which American troops come across a party of Nazi necromancers on a Scottish island. The Germans, with the assistance of a still-not-dead Rasputin (Karel Rodin), open a gate to Hell, out of which escapes an impish red fiend with a hugely swollen fist. A melée ensues and the troops manage to capture the creature and bring him back to America, where he eventually grows up into a cigar-chomping, cat-fancying Ron Perlman.

In the present, Hellboy and his coterie - including fire-sprite Selma Blair, mortal G-man Rupert Evans and a merman voiced by Frasier's David Hyde Pierce - are called upon to save the world when Rasputin and his pals return to court some sort of Apocalypse.

In truth, the plot is (even for this sort of material) a tad too absurd to care about, and the film is around 20 minutes too long, but Mignola's fantastic universe is so lovingly assembled that the picture never becomes boring. If nothing else, Hellboy is worth seeing to savour the sight of the burly, gruff Perlman, one of cinema's great attendant lords, enjoying a rare moment in the spotlight.

We await Hellboy 2 with eager anticipation.