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Like a cat with a fuzzy Nerf toy and just about the same attention span. Andrew Tracy’s complained that del Toro’s Hellboy II stagings are too ham-fisted, lumbering and abrupt where they ought to be … well, I don’t know what they ought to be, aside from not existing at all, since I can’t imagine anyone bringing more keenly tuned awareness to the meticulous ins and outs of this fabricator’s art, all the precision-crafted mini motifs that, as seems to me obvious from the get-go, most contemporary pulp directors couldn’t begin to emulate, much less think of in the first place. Of course, Peter Jackson might, though with Jackson narrative’s a necessary form of discipline: there has to be a through line to bring the proliferating effects together. But Del Toro’d rather wing it: this I like, and this, and this, like one of Brian De Palma’s mad, free-associating frenzies (a la Raising Cain), only del Toro does it better, his this ‘n’ that balancing act more exactingly executed and felt. And there’s no sitting back to admire the spectacle, since already he’s pushing to the next effect, and the next one after that. (For intelligent critical back-and-forth addressing many of Tracy’s points, see Jim Emerson’s Scanners link here.)
But where Tracy sees hackabout, I see, e.g., Minnelli and Miyazaki—in the elegantly confected beanstalk creature, delicate, graceful, and menacing at the same time. Or Brakhage, in the resurrected robot armies: all those compositional curlicues in elementary reds and blues. Or Joseph H. Lewis and the B studio auteurs of the 40s and 50s, termite energies burrowing into their finest—as in most demented—work. Which of course was and still remains resolutely commercial, ergo, in Tracy’s cleansing, puritanical light, “corrupt,” just another co-opting product of Hollywood Moloch, Inc.
