Del Toro fought with Harvey Weinstein throughout production over the film’s tone and pacing, with Weinstein attempting to fire GDT until Sorvino intervened on her director’s behalf. Nonetheless, del Toro did not get final cut on the picture (although he created his own director’s cut in 2011) and the result is a film that seems both rushed and turgid, typical of the mark of Harvey Scissorhands at the time. The monsters and some of the striking visual imagery, however, pointed to a brighter future for the young director.

Giant Robot in Pacific Rim

11. Pacific Rim (2013)

Del Toro’s first film in five years (and after spending three years developing The Hobbit for Peter Jackson and then another year on a canceled adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness) was, in many ways, a disappointing return for the filmmaker. While his love for the kaiju genre is apparent, and the scale of the movie is vast, Pacific Rim is also a strangely dull and impersonal effort for del Toro.

Part of that has to fall on the shoulders of so-called leading man Charlie Hunnam, a fair enough actor with all the charisma of a block of wood. His character, along with those played by Idris Elba (who is saddled with the name Stacker Pentecost and lines like “We are canceling the apocalypse!”), Charlie Day, Ron Perlman, Max Martini, and others, are barely developed. Meanwhile the clashes between the rather forgettable kaiju and Jaegers have all the excitement of watching over a friend’s shoulder as they play a video game. In the end, it’s a personality free film in a genre that thrives on personality, even if it’s that of a 400-foot-tall, fire-breathing lizard.

Wesley Snipes and Ron Perlman in Blade II

10. Blade II (2002)

Guillermo del Toro’s forays into the world of comic books have not been your standard capes-and-masks affairs, to say the least, and this sequel to 1997’s Blade, the first movie to actually do reasonable justice to a Marvel character, would barely be recognizable to fans of the modern MCU. Wesley Snipes returns as the vampire-human hybrid who hunts the former by day until he is forced to team with a squad of vampires (including bad-ass Ron Perlman) to protect humans and vampires alike from a mutant strain of bloodsuckers who want to wipe us all off the planet (although whose blood would they drink then?)

Once again, del Toro’s flair for mind-searing imagery and grisly, macabre deaths shines through, along with his unabashed zeal for making truly horrific vampires. But we still prefer the first Blade. The action and gore are almost nonstop in this one, a thin chain of sequences on which the fragments of a plot are hung, and we’re given very little in the way of characters to care about. Some of that falls on the shoulders of writer David S. Goyer, but the empathy that comes across in del Toro’s better movies is missing, making for a brutal, often numbing two hours.

Ron Perlman in Hellboy II

9. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008)

Whereas the first Hellboy was a blast of horror comic book fun, incorporating demons, paranormal investigations, Nazi occultism, and Lovecraftian monsters from “outside,” the second one veers into a decidedly more fantasy-oriented direction—we dare might even invoke the term “fairy tale”—involving elves, trolls, giant plant-creatures ,and more. Ron Perlman returns in the title role, as perfectly cast as ever, while Selma Blair and Doug Jones also encore as Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien, respectively.

Danofgeek