Thanks to its one-two punch of pulp-fiction archetypes and an encyclopedic grasp of demonology — and a considerable degree of cockeyed humor — 2004’s “Hellboy” was the comic-book superhero movie for people who hate comic-book superhero movies. It didn’t hurt to have the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”) and his fabulist imagination at the helm of the obsessively detailed costumes and design, which extended to elaborately conceived monsters, mythological contraptions, and the crime-fighting freaks of nature led by that cigar-chomping, kitten-loving spawn of Satan: Hellboy.

Mr. del Toro’s visionary fancies raise the ante for fans of his art-house fare, and they surely provide an unexpected bonus for the rock-’em, sock-’em popcorn munchers in the multiplexes. Handed a $72 million budget for the “Hellboy” sequel, Mr. del Toro goes for the gusto. He gorges on computer-generated effects like steroids, creating opening and closing battles royale that exploit the multiplicity of destructive entities: whether it’s flesh-eating airborne orbs that chatter like angry ferrets or the eternally dormant Golden Army (mechanized robot warriors whose rise from the mists of history promises the end of mankind) of the title.

All that stands in their way is Hellboy, whom actor Ron Perlman again plays as a beer-drinking, fight-craving, film-noir tough guy with a big, gooey soft spot underlying his crusty veneer. Mr. Perlman’s cranky yet congenial performance keeps things grounded, even when he’s clobbering supernatural forces whose fourth-dimensional juju is vastly more sophisticated than his street-fighter skill set.

Picking up where the first film left off, Hellboy (who began life in 1993 as a character in the pages of Dark Horse Comics) is working things out with his girlfriend, Liz (Selma Blair), whose habit of spontaneously combusting into flames means he always has a light for his cigar. Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), the gill-man with psychic powers, still pines for true love and reads up on Tennyson. And Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), who heads the FBI’s secret Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, continues to deny his organization’s existence — even as Hellboy and his crew mug for news cameras.

This time around, the gang is up against the power-mad faerie prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who is out to avenge a breach between mankind and the mythical realm to whose crown he is heir. Should he succeed, it’s curtains. But Hellboy has an ally in Princess Nuala (Anna Walton). The prince’s twin sister arrives in New York from the fantasy dimension with the missing piece of a puzzle that her brother needs in order to complete a ritual that will unleash the dreaded Golden Army. Exhale.

The expository elements of the movie are not nearly as interesting as the excuse they provide for Mr. del Toro and his production designer, Stephen Scott, to create crowded taxonomies of fantastic creatures. There’s an amazing set piece staged in an otherworldly portal beneath the Brooklyn Bridge that outdoes the bar scene in “Star Wars” tenfold. The camera revels in an assortment of beings derived from the same ectomorphic DNA as the child-eating monster from “Pan’s Labyrinth,” with spindly limbs and eyeballs in all the wrong places. Less fascinating but equally pervasive is the director’s investment in whirring, clocklike mechanisms and their sprockety menace — a long-standing motif in Mr. del Toro’s films that gets supersized against the CGI canvas bankrolled by Universal.

As a fan of Mr. del Toro’s art-house hits who finds most superhero movies tedious and freighted with gratuitous noise — visual as well as aural — I’ll confess that the film’s big battle sequences made me sleepy. Likewise, the sheer extravagance of the director’s esoteric monster designs and hallucinatory netherworlds almost feels like a waste, because the pace of the film allows scarce time for the images to resonate or permeate the viewer’s consciousness in a meaningful way. If “Pan’s Labyrinth” was a boutique display of Mr. del Toro’s dreams and nightmares, then “Hellboy II” is a yard sale that anticipates a Christmas rush on plastic replicas of its boogeymen at Toys “R” Us.