Fancast: The Big Picture

Hellboy II: The Golden Army - 7/11
Mike Mignola's groundbreaking, visual-driven work in his Hellboy comic series and the subsequent B.P.R.D. books had a few hitches in the first adaptation to the big screen, as any first-franchise-film tends to have. But one thing it got right was Ron Perlman as the rough and tumble attitude of the burly, pancake-loving demon raised by good people and currently working for the government' agency for investigating paranormal disturbances - the kind of place Fox Mulder would love to work. This time around, dark forces from mystical world are declaring full-scale war on an unsuspecting humanity, and the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense will have to seriously amp up the "defense" side of things.

Now that director Guillermo Del Toro has the strength of his masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth to spring from, the hope is there that Hellboy II: The Golden Army will follow the pattern of second-franchise-films that blow the original out of the water. Knowing that Mignola himself loves to see other people's interpretations of Hellboy makes it easier to swallow the changes from the source material, such as giving Hellboy and troubled firebug Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) a romantic relationship of some kind, but even that looks as though it'll be played up well. Along with mer-man Abe Sapien is a new B.P.R.D. recruit, Johann Kraus, who promises to up the requisite weird quotient, as he's a disembodied spirit walking around in a containment suit. But the film will rise or fall based on the cigar-chomping red guy wielding the big Right Hand of Doom to beat up monsters, which has always been at the heart of the series.

Watch the latest trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Watch the first trailer for Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
Watch a clip from the original Hellboy.
Watch the trailer for Del Toro's critically-acclaimed film Pan's Labyrinth.