A Constant Visual Feast

This may be the baldest instance of me setting aside my senses and turning off my brain for the sake of liking a movie I want to like; there are, without question, aspects of The Crooked Man that scream “how did that effect get a pass?!”, just for starters, notably the abominably terrible spider-thing that attacks the two leads to kick off the film. But on the other hand, look, yes, that spider-thing looks bad, but the rest of the movie isn’t bad by association, right?

It may be my insistence on cinema as a democratic medium speaking here, but I am grateful The Crooked Man exists explicitly as a rebuke to larger budgeting requirements imposed on the average comic book movie. I do not think comic book movies are somehow innately bad. I think plenty of them are good! I also think too much money is put into them, particularly given how terrible they often turn out. So The Crooked Man‘s low-fi design feels damn near revolutionary, whether in the broader scheme of “comic book cinema” or even in the narrower context of “Hellboy cinema,” long dominated by Guillermo del Toro.

So I got into all of that stuff in my piece about the film, which ran over at the ol’ Cool Material.