Courtesy of Universal
Which ‘Hellboy II’ Creatures Deserve Their Own Spinoffs?
You might have noticed that Hellboy II: The Golden Army has been getting some pretty great reviews. Getting particularly noticed is the wild menagerie of creatures sprung from director Guillermo del Toro’s imagination. With all this positive attention, it seems certain that at least one of these monsters will catch the public’s fancy and earn its own lucrative spinoff project. Sure, a lot of the monsters are sort of ugly, but as Del Toro tells Variety, “Physical ugliness is very important. Let us be free in our ugliness, our fattiness, our smelliness, the unpleasantness. Whatever the fuck we are, let us be. Let us be whatever we are. Monsters can be that.†And so can popular spinoff characters!
After the jump, check out our odds for Hellboy spinoff success.
My Daughter Married Cathedral Head
When Enid encouraged her only daughter to marry a guy who knew how to keep a roof over his head, this isn’t what she had in mind at all! Now, her daughter Chelsea has married Cathedral Head, and it’s been nothing but bickering ever since. The fact that Cathedral Head doesn’t have a mouth means that he doesn’t communicate very well, so Mom has to step in and encourage him to open up. Can an unconventional couple learn to co-exist happily with her mother without the walls tumbling down?
Odds: 15 to 1
M. Night Shyamalan’s The Tooth Fairy, an M. Night Shyamalan Film by M. Night Shyamalan
The tooth fairy gives money to little boys and girls. That’s what the legend says. But Philadelphia music teacher Gloria Potter doesn’t believe in legends, and she doesn’t want her son to believe in them, either. So when her son wakes up screaming in the night, she tries to ignore it until she’s forced to confront the terror in her own house.
Odds: 9 to 1
Welcome to Camp, Mr. Wink!
The campers at Tally-Ho Lake gather in their bunks at night and talk about the strange creature that lurks in the kitchen doing dishes, which they can never quite see behind the curtain. He looks big, they say. He looks scary, they say. And when they finally make a PB&J run in the middle of the night, they run smack into Mr. Wink, who’s retired from the superhero world and retreated to a life of isolation. When the campers have to take on a neighboring rich-kids’ camp in a Ping-Pong match to win the rights to canoe on the lake, it turns out that Mr. Wink’s giant iron mace gives him a spin serve nobody can defeat. In the end, it turns out that everyone’s talent is special.
Odds: 3 to 1
Disney’s The Three-Headed Dog
This dog may have been cut from the Hellboy II — in which it was meant only to appear in the background, licking itself — for budgetary reasons, but in this family comedy, three times the heads means three times the fun! When Lila takes her dog to the vet to have two of its three heads removed, she meets a charming young doctor who convinces her to raise the dog naturally with the heads intact. He even agrees to help Lila and her widowed mother, and as they learns how to accept the dog as he is and arrange his water dish so he doesn’t drown, Lila’s family may just learn to love again.
Odds: Even money.
—Linda Holmes