It's a romcom with monsters

Guillermo del Toro's last directorial outing was the beautiful-looking Pan's Labyrinth, an arthouse fantasy fable set in Franco-era Spain featuring imaginary bulbous beasts with tiny little eyes dotted about in unexpected parts of their bodies.

It is a relief, as well as quite exciting, that Del Toro has returned to the action-fantasy thriller series Hellboy, based on Mike Mignola's comics: it is a crackingly enjoyable and exciting sequel, with something that the memory of Pan's Labyrinth might have entirely erased: a sense of humour.

Because Hellboy II is a comedy, as well as and ahead of everything else.

Ron Perlman gives a very funny and winning performance as the Tandoori-red anti-hero with the serious cigar habit, the sawn-off horns, the mighty pecs and the imperceptible nipples: Hellboy, a being from the netherworld who as, a fiery imp, was discovered by the US army in 1944 and who, with other like-minded and like-bodied creatures, has joined America's top-secret battle against dark forces.

This spectacular movie seethes and fizzes with wit and energy, absorbing and transforming influences such as Ghostbusters and even Harry Potter and the secret world of Diagon Alley.

At his obviously mature age, Hellboy is, incidentally, entitled to upgrade his name to adult level but has decided against it, perhaps because of unfortunate associations with mayonnaise.

Hellboy is still working for the government; he's a maverick just about tolerated by his uptight boss, Tom Manning, played by Jeffrey Tambor.

He is very much together with his girlfriend, the pyro-magician who periodically bursts into flames, Liz Sherman (Selma Blair); their relationship had a beauty-and-the-beast piquancy in the first film, but now strains are showing, and the public and the media are not impressed when they discover that this weirdo couple are on the public payroll.

One conservative TV commentator notes that theirs is an 'inter-species union - a threat to marriage fuelled by federal funds!'

They are assisted by Abe (Doug Jones), full and unwieldy name Abraham Sapien ('I don't like it either'), a strange creature who is tormented in love towards the end of the film and tries to smarten up his image by daintily applying huge blue contact lenses to his great fish-insect eyes.

To Hellboy's fury and Manning's smug satisfaction, the government drafts in a new team leader over Hellboy's head, an ectoplasmic German called Johann Krauss, who is basically just a wisp of shape-shifting smoke inside what looks like a diver's outfit.

He has to be the most unsympathetic screen German since the businessmen Hans and Fritz in The Simpsons, who buy up the Springfield power plant and make disobliging comments about the local beverage.

Hellboy playfully mispronounces his name 'Kraut' and on being corrected, earnestly notes the final two letters of his name: 'SS'. Yet it is Johann who is wiser, in the end.

The heroes are ranged against a hateful new demon in the form of Prince Nuada, played by Luke Goss with long silver hair and long silver face, a malcontent from that hidden universe that Del Toro loves to locate just underneath our boring normal world.

He is obsessed with getting his hands on a lost and fractured crown that will give him the power to command a mighty and unbeatable golden army.

The only faintly restraining influence is his twin sister Princess Nuala (Anna Walton), who is later to conceive a tendresse for Abe and who physically feels any hurt or affront to her brother in her own body.

It is this transgressive love affair that triggers the goofiest and most lovable part of the film: when lovestruck Abe and beerstruck Hellboy start singing along to Barry Manilow's Can't Smile Without You.

The battle against Prince Nuada gives rise to more encounters with weird Del Toro-ish creatures with little eyes in odd parts of their bodies and clothes.

But these mighty contests are always less important and less interesting than Hellboy's smaller encounters with lesser monsters and it is Hellboy's cheerful conviction that there is no creature who cannot be slapped into submission, or simply blasted by his big revolver - the weapon and the belief system giving him a distinct resemblance to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry.

In the underground troll market, Hellboy discovers a very odd female entity breast-feeding what appears to be an infant, which indignantly shrieks: "I'm not a baby; I'm a tumour!"

'Visionary' is a word too easily applied to fantasy movies, but it sticks easily here, because of the laid-back and likable way the characters are represented; you can envision them actually existing.

However obtuse it sounds, they are very human with human failings and human characteristics and I found myself rooting for the Hellboy-Liz relationship much more fervently than that of any recent romcom.

Hellboy II_is a movie that's a tingling boost to the senses: and that sense of humour is such a stimulus to the other five.