The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro is behind this exhilaratingly grotesque summation of Mike Mignola's Dark Horse Comics superhero - but those expecting another disturbing dose of fantasy coupled with stark reality, such as The Devil's Backbone or the Oscar-winning Pan's Labyrinth, should steer clear. It's not the same kind of thing at all.

This, like the first Hellboy, is del Toro on holiday in Hollywood, having as much fun as he can without totally compromising his considerable powers of invention.

It does, however, beat most of this summer's blockbuster entertainments into pulp and, at the same time, whet the appetite for his forthcoming two-part version of The Hobbit, taken from a screenplay by Peter Jackson.

Central to the fun is Ron Perlman's Hellboy, a huge but reasonably kindly red-faced fighting machine with cropped horns and a swishing tail.

He may be the child of Lucifer but he's been given his name not by the Devil but by American soldiers into whose hands he has fallen during the Second World War.

Now we see him as a boy adopted and raised by the kindly Professor Broom (John Hurt), who tells him a story about a benevolent king who has called a truce in a warring world by breaking his crown into three pieces. If they are joined up, the conflict will begin again.

When the wicked Prince Nuada (Luke Goss) comes to life, aroused from thousands of years of Nordic slumber, and tries to mend the crown, he is opposed by his beautiful twin Princess Nuala (Anna Walton) and a collection of misfits called the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

They are stationed in New Jersey and assisted by a German ectoplasm expert who can do terrible things at the drop of a hat.

One of these misfits is the amiable, cigar-smoking Hellboy who is sustained by his girl Liz (Selma Blair), who breaks out in flames now and then when emotionally aroused, by a strange fishlike creature called Abe Sapien (Doug Jones) and by Jeffrey Tambor's bossy but confused bureau chief.

When part of the ancient crown is auctioned in New York, Prince Nuada strikes. Thousands of wriggling carnivorous creatures eat up auctioneer and bidders alike and Hellboy can do very little about it.

He does, however, fight a giant plant with tentacles bigger than his tail later on, all the while holding a baby he has rescued from the ensuing chaos.

He also has a drunk scene with Jones's amphibian, crooning to Barry Manilow's Can't Smile Without You. And towards the end, after falling for Princess Nuala, largely because of a shared love of Tennyson's verse, there is a grand showdown on the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, which del Toro assures us is his tribute to Chaplin's Modern Times with its huge machinery composed of cog wheels and ratchets threatening heroes and villains alike.

It is del Toro's combination of humour and invention, thrills and spills that make the movie so entertaining. Ten effects houses aided him and so does Guillermo Navarro, his brilliant cinematographer.

The parade of creatures shows that the film-makers have been influenced not just by other films but also by literature and art, including Goya, Blake, Fuseli and Bosch.

None of this, though, is pressed too hard since Hellboy II is, after all, aimed at a mass audience for whom The Dark Knight was a mite too serious in tone.

It is del Toro milking his imaginative mind for all it is worth while attempting to keep everything reasonably simple in the telling.

This is certainly not Pan's Labyrinth, with its horrific Spanish Civil War background.

It is a summer epic that involved del Toro enough to persuade him to help out personally with the creature vocals but which never for a moment strains to suggest profundity.

Even if you prefer his more serious work, this is certainly something to see.