Horror comic with a soulful sweetness

Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics have a drizzly, musty gothic ambience -- the same fetid air that H. P. Lovecraft circulated in his fiction. The writer and director Guillermo del Toro has brought a similar woozy, disconcerting melancholy to his film adaptation, and his obvious affection and affinity for that dankness alone would make Hellboy worth seeing. But del Toro lets loose with an all-American, vaudevillian rambunctiousness that makes the movie daffy, loose and lovable.

For del Toro, this is hard-core. He turned down a shot at directing the third Harry Potter film because he nurtured a need to bring Mignola's colossal, monstrous-looking, Twizzler-colored champion to the screen. The director's determination pays off, mostly, as a dreamy mating of filmmaker, craft and material.

He also multiplied what Mignola (and John Byrne, who wrote the script of the comic series Seed of Destruction, from which the movie comes) envisioned by casting Ron Perlman in the lead, an actor whose unruffled, seedy dynamism gives Hellboy a raffish soulfulness.

Del Toro's concentration and visible love of the material and Perlman's witty and intuitive performance keep the movie afloat when the action sequences threaten to make it routine. Perlman enriches the film with emotional complication, giving Hellboy's vanity a piquancy. This devilish beast files down the horns on his head and has the swagger of a hipster mutant who takes pleasure in swatting down evil and exhaling plumes of smoke from a constant stream of cigars.

The story is pretty complicated. During World War II, Hitler, apparently anticipating story elements of Raiders of the Lost Ark, sends a special squad led by Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden), the mad, mad monk, to rend the interdimensional barriers and obtain a creature that will give the edge to the Nazis. Given that the Nazis' black-magic squad has the unkillable Kroenen (Ladislav Beran) slicing through the Allies with a pair of gleaming retractable blades, you have to ask how much more of an edge does the Third Reich need? (If Hitler had access to just one of the superassassins assigned to him in the movies, we'd be living in a very different world today.)

Rasputin accomplishes his

otherworldly task with a whirling device that sends blue-white bolts through the countryside and also looks like the logo of one of the film's financiers, Revolution Studios. Rasputin's conjuring leads to the emergence of an infant creature, red as sin, with a long tail, who falls into the hands of the Allies. The kindly British scientist Dr Broom (John Hurt) tames the tiny scarlet devil with a Baby Ruth the size of a bazooka. Adopted by Dr Broom, Hellboy, with his huge, stonelike left arm, becomes the go-to guy for the good doctor and the antiapparition league known as the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense.

The movie shifts to the modern day, when that bureau is run by the snarling Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor), who's growing tired of coming up with lies to hide Hellboy's existence. He's charged with maintaining both Hellboy, who consumes mass quantities of food and beer, and the sensitive psychic Abe Sapien (Doug Jones), the water-dweller with the flesh of a trout (and a sonorous voice supplied by David Hyde Pierce). A new agent is assigned to baby-sit the pair, the nervous John Myers (Rupert Evans).