Second date, no tongue!

Rating: 8/10 (19 October 2004)

The movie begins in 1944 Scotland with American soldiers accompanied by a bookish, bespectacled Professor Broom, psychic adviser to President Roosevelt. There, they find a small contingent of Nazis, the most enduring of villains and a remarkably spry-looking Rasputin attempting to open a portal to another dimension. The occult interests of Adolph Hitler never got much attention at the time, but in recent years at least it's made for some new twists on the tired old villains.
Anyway, the good guys ruin the party for the Nazis, knocking Rasputin through the dimensional hole, but not before a demon baby comes through the portal. It's coaxed down with a Baby Ruth candy bar and, like a wolf pup adopted by humans, becomes tame. Fast forward a few years. The demon is now an adult has a fondness for cats and cigars has filed his horns down to almost nothing in an attempt to be a regular guy and works for elderly Professor Broom in the Bureau for Paranormal Research.
Broom is dying of cancer and knows it. He's brought in a replacement/successor, John Myers. Myers gets a tour of the place, where he meets Hellboy and Abe Sapien, a telepathic fish-man who likes to eat rotten eggs. While Broom is an old man, his old enemies haven't aged a day. Escaped Nazi Ilsa and a robotic character named Kroenen perform a ceremony to bring back Rasputin from the other side, looking none the worse for wear, and the fight is back on.
My nits are minor things. In the end, the film is carried to its fun but entirely predictable conclusion by the strength of Del Toro's excellent direction and Perlman's total embodiment of the character. It also seems like I've seen this movie so many times before. But seeing as though it is a comic book flick, what can you expect. Really? The movie is nothing special, but it's better than some comic movies out there today. Not great, but certainly not bad either.
***/*****