It’s been said that no matter how crowded it gets, there’s always more room in hell. That may or may not be true, but the Hellboy movies sure have proven to be inclusive ensembles. Though sprung from the imagination of Mike Mignola‘s mid-1990s graphic novel series — about a giant red demon spawn rescued from occult Nazi forces during World War II, and raised as part of a clandestine, paranormal crime-fighting organization — the movies are of course largely the product of the expansive imagination of Guillermo del Toro, who has written and directed both feature films. Though he takes Hellboy, his pals and some other characters straight from Mignola’s work, others are tweaked mightily, and still more created from scratch. The result, especially in this week’s Hellboy II: The Golden Army, is a dizzily detailed world, crammed with creatures both gorgeous and grotesque. For a fun, handy primer on some of the movie’s major supporting players, from Reelz Channel, click here.

It’s flaming out theatrically, already clinging to the 10th spot at the box office, and on course to gross only around $35 million domestically, but in doing some hard drive cleaning I stumbled across this even-more-interesting-in-retrospect quote from The Love Guru‘s co-writer, Graham Gordy, about the manner in which Mike Myers work-shopped his prodigiously bearded character of Guru Pitka.

“We did stage shows, and Mike tested the character,” says Gordy. “We had a character and a glut of jokes and wanted to put it in some sort of form, so we had a show we did in 100-seat theaters in New York. We ended up doing eight or nine of them over a period of about two years, and what we would do is put a half-hour of written material with a half-hour question-and-answer period. We’d record it all and see which of the jokes played in the written material, and Mike would always have two or three really great things that we would take from the Q&A that we would end up putting in (the script). As it went along we would take out the stuff that didn’t play. It’s all based on the idea that the Marx brothers toured all of their shows for six months before they ever put anything on film. And Mike is such a rigorous comedian that he says, ‘I don’t want to put a joke in a movie if it hasn’t been laughed at.’ That was the process.” Yikes. All of which raises the question… if “Bring me some alligator soup, and make it snappy!” made the final cut, what were the jokes that weren’t laughed at?

I previously mentioned its top-shelf opening joke, but one of the weirdest tangential tidbits from Mike Myers’ The Love Guru involves the repeated evocation of Mariska Hargitay‘s name as a sort of blessed mantra.

As with Myers’ Austin Powers character, the preparation for the film involved a number of improvisational public performances of the character, to help workshop material, and that’s where the Hargitay joke came from. “A friend of mine and I played Mike’s main devotees,” explains co-writer Graham Gordy, “so we shaved our heads, and did intros about how the guru changed our lives. I was a junior high basketball coach from Joplin, Missouri that was selling meth out of the trunk of my Chrysler LeBaron, and the Guru Pitka found me face down in vomit behind an Outback Steakhouse, and pulled me up and helped me out. And this other guy, Eric Gilliland, is friends with Mariska Hargitay. So when he said that she was going to be there one night, at one of the shows, we just started saying [her name], and then we started saying ‘Paula Zahn.’ Mariska Hargitay was there and started laughing hysterically in the crowd. That may have been the first stage show we ever did, and it just caught on from there. And we were like, ‘Really? People know who Mariska Hargitay is, but will they get that as a joke?’ But eventually it became so ridiculous that it just stayed.”

Uwe Boll is a filmmaking machine. In the shadow of the turbulent theatrical release of his latest flick, the videogame adaptation Postal, he has a couple more flicks on the horizon for this year — maybe two, maybe three, maybe four. The tally should definitely include, however, the horror movie Seed (which Boll previously lectured me on here, saying that under U.S. law if one survives three executions they have to be set free) and Boll’s Vietnam war flick, 1968 Tunnel Rats (yes, that’s the actual name of the movie). I interviewed him recently, and these are some more of the odds and ends:

Brent Simon: Running over a list of your future projects, what’s set to see release next, after Postal?

Uwe Boll: Yeah, Seed and 1968 Tunnel Rats, the Vietnam war movie, are both done. Seed will be a direct-to-DVD movie only, coming out unrated. We didn’t get an R rating so I dropped the idea for a theatrical release, because I don’t want to cut it. I think it only works if it’s so hard, how it is. It will be out later this year. And 1968 Tunnel Rats, we tried to get a theatrical release going — it’s a very intense, bitter war movie. And I think it turned out very good because all the young actors went to South African boot camp before we shot, and it wasn’t a boot camp like a film boot camp or something, it was real mercenaries who had just fought in Congo. And they took our actors into the jungle for 10 days and they were all, like, completely freaked out.

BS: Err, wait — are you sure this wasn’t Tropic Thunder?

UB: No, it was not fake. This paid off, because in a way the guys were really mentally trashed, and then we started shooting. The movie is very horrific, and for the actors it was hard, because when you go around the corner there’s a booby-trap with a grenade or there are snakes and spiders and trap-doors where you can fall down, and tunnels you can get drawn (into) and get flooded with water and gas and everything. So it was very hard for these actors to do this movie, and the boot camp was unbelievably important to bring everyone into character. I think it’s a very intense war movie that shows you never win in a war — even if you survive, you lose. I think this comes across.