Here we are, then: Hellboy take three. After Guillermo del Toro’s superb 2004-to-’08 double bill and Neil Marshall’s bloated 2019 attempt to take things into harsher action-horror territory, we now get the purist’s approach. Directed by Brian ‘Crank’ Taylor, who also co-wrote the script with Hellboy creator Mike Mignola (drawing heavily on his limited-edition series), Hellboy: The Crooked Man strips away the fantastical spectacle and brings its diabolic hero down to ground level, as it were, in a gritty low-fi chiller.

Similarly to Matt Reeves’ The Batman, there’s thankfully no attempt to re-tell Hellboy’s origin story. We’re just dropped right into another day at the office — or rather field trip — picking up with Red and his obligatory attractive-female sidekick (Adeline Rudolph) while they’re transporting a magically mutated funnel-web spider from A to B. Shit swiftly goes south in a little train-crash/monster-tussle set-piece that’s fun enough to forgive the evident limitations of the VFX and offer some hope for what follows. However, once the main plot kicks in, that hope quickly dissipates.

The problem is, with the reduced scale, there’s also an acute lowering of stakes. Whereas previously we saw a guy who was created to end the world having to save that world (which understandably hates and fears him), here he’s just messing inconsequentially around with a local supernatural annoyance in a barely populated cranny of Nowheresville.