Mike Mignola’s award-winning comic franchise “Hellboy” has been adapted into four motion pictures now, and this may be a controversial statement, but there’s never been a bad one. Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy” movies were ambitious and beautiful, especially “The Golden Army,” which ranks among his finest works. Neil Marshall’s “Hellboy” reboot stripped away the classiness and focused instead on the series’ freewheeling wildness, an unfocused but enjoyably weird adaptation. It isn’t popular but that doesn’t make it bad. Give it time. It’ll find its audience.

The new reboot, Brian Taylor’s “Hellboy: The Crooked Man,” will need more than time to find its fanbase. The cheapest entry in the series (by a wide margin) was released in Europe to little fanfare a month ago, then dumped on VOD in the United States this week when nobody was looking. No press screenings, no screeners,...