DVD reviews: Hellboy 2: The Golden Army | Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging

Published on Friday 5 December 2008 16:24

HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY (12) £22.99 Director: Guillermo del Toro Running time: 115 minutes ****

Four years after exploding onto the screen, Hellboy returned this summer and again was directed by the fantastical eye of Pan's Labyrinth's Guillermo del Toro. Del Toro's complete and unashamed love and skill for fantasy is borne out here with lashings of cheeky humour and a multicolour swap shop palette. Having been brought up by Nazis but adopted by John Hurt and brought to the nice side of life, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is busy working away at fighting the supernatural with his mates and girlfriend. But when an ancient truce comes to an end and threatens to unleash the goblins on the world, our red-faced horny devil must step into the breach. Del Torro has great fun here, and those familiar with his special-effects flare in Pan's Labyrinth will be comforted to see that, once again given the keys to the toy box of this comic adaptation, he absolutely makes the most of it. In a year when The Dark Knight dominated viewing and thinking on what constitutes a modern comic-book adaptation, it would be a crime worse than the Joker's to forget that while black capes and cracked smiles were stealing all the glory, a giant red superhero with a heart wasn't doing too bad a job of keeping the genre alive too.

ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING (12) 15.99

Director: Gurinder Chadha

Running time: 100 minutes

***

Gurinder Chadha here taps into that oft-neglected market in cinema audiences – the teenage girl. Not the tweenage girl, or the 15 certificate-and-up girl, but the girl who still spends most of her time in her bedroom dreaming the dream of Prince Charming in the form of the boy across the school playground. The Bend It Like Beckham director takes on the mutli-million selling teen novels of Louise Rennison, who has captured the market in that pre-sex innocence of young teenage girls on the brink of adulthood. While that may make the film sound old-fashioned, it's far from it. Fourteen-year-old Georgia Nicolson (played by Georgia Groome) is our heroine, who courts the friendship of boys she doesn't really fancy in order to get in enough snogging practice to bag the boy she really does. The charm of Chadha's film is strongly rooted in the fact Georgia is very much an average girl. Not in a High School Musical Gabriella way, but in a very British way, as she lives out her adolescence in the terraced housing of a seaside town and takes on the perils of the rites of passage years with a dry humour that could only ever have been made in England.