It's getting hot in here

On top of a head as big and red as the sun, Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has a Steven Seagal ponytail and two sawed-off horns. Years ago, baby Hellboy was rescued from a thwarted Nazi experiment by kindly American scientists, and now, he files the horns daily, the way most men shave a reminder that just because he was born a little devilish, he can be something better.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army follows the social inversions of a typical fairy tale: the dirty orphan is the good guy while the bad guy is the upper crust-y Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), a ghostly hybrid of Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings and Kirsten Dunst, with seams on his face. The prince is on a mission to find the missing piece of a crown that will unleash the long-latent Golden Army thundering, soulless machines that look like humongous bags of steaming rocks and wage war on humans. The secret legions of mythical creatures, as Nuada sees it, have been getting a bum rap, exiled to the margins of the world. And though hes a villain, when the Prince makes his case against the death of one more fantastic being at the hands of the callous human race, you sense that writer-director Guillermo del Toro is speaking through him.

No filmmaker is more in touch with magic and the potential of a wild, fully liberated imagination than del Toro. In the more thoughtful, and comparatively sedentary, film Pans Labyrinth, del Toro put his legions of inspired creatures to adult use in an anti-fascist allegory. But in Hellboy 2, hes mostly just playing.

At the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, Hellboys chums include the sage fish-creature Abe (Doug Jones, who exactly conveys a fish when he walks not easy) and Hellboys girlfriend, Liz (Selma Blair), who looks pretty normal except for the fact that she turns into a Tikki torch from time to time. Joining the crew is Johann Strauss (voiced by The Family Guys Seth Macfarlane), whose retro space suit holds him in; hes actually made entirely of super-powerful smoke. (One worries that Johann might strip down and stand too close to human-fireball Liz, which could be confusing.)

While these four form a kind of X-Men troop trying to keep the prince from his tiara, the encounters on their journey break up the perfunctory superhero quest. Theres a rock beast that cracks free of the moors of Ireland and an Angel of Death with a fleshy hammerhead and eyes dotting his peacock wings. Most marvelously, Hellboy takes on an "elemental" creature, which starts as a seed and grows with a bit of water into a twisting vine that overtakes Brooklyn. When Hellboy slays the green beast at last, it bleeds meadows and moss, and okay, Im fully aware that sounds ridiculous, but in this era of CGI abuse, if theres been a more sublime moment of movie magic than a pasture slowly overtaking cars and curbs and concrete, I havent seen it.

Beyond the heart-stopping visual delights, the pleasures of the two Hellboy films are mostly due to Perlman. He plays the big galumph in a comic key without ever resorting to cuteness. Hellboy might drink beer, chomp cigars and spout one-liners, but hes also in constant conversation with his evil genetic legacy. True to the spirit of the original Hellboy comic by Mike Mignola, del Toro never forgets his anti-heros poignant core: Hellboy has to prove to the world that hes good, perhaps even better than human.

In an underdeveloped storyline, Hellboys got some domestic issues to deal with Liz is on him about the dishes, etc. but hes still in love. When Abe falls for the Princes good twin (Anna Walton), he and Hellboy have a drunken bonding session singing along to a Barry Manilow tune. Im not sure how del Toro manages to corral this moment away from excruciating and toward something quite sweet Joness gently quivering fish-voice helps but he does. Actual wit in a monster movie? What would George Lucas say?

Lately, superheroes have gone from being true to their names to tortured loners fielding public skepticism; when Hellboy is spat on by one of the clueless humans after rescuing a baby, the film echoes Spiderman 3 and the recent Hancock. Del Toro joins the chorus, warning us away from our cynicism and urging belief in the treasures he keeps conjuring up from a limitless imagination were lucky to behold.

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army opens July 11.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.