With a huge fan-base fueled by the original Mike Mignola comic books and the DVD of the semi-hit 2004 film, anticipation runs high for Universal’s all-out sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army--especially in light of director and ultimate fanboy Guillermo Del Toro’s Oscar winning masterpiece Pan's Labyrinth.

But beware, this new Hellboy considerably ramps up the body count, triples the creatures and steps up the volume. As you may recall Red, aka Hellboy (Ron Perlman), was born in 1955, the apparent result of a unique mating ritual between the Nazis and the Devil. As years went by, he escaped his grim pedigree by becoming a reluctant cigar-chomping force for good.

Hellboy II opens with a flashback in which his nominal father-figure Professor Broom (John Hurt) reads him a Christmas Eve bedtime story about the creation of the Golden Army, something SO evil, it had to be deep-sixed in a deal The Crown cut with the human race. Cut to a half century later, and this bedtime info comes in handy as Red is now an employee of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense where he works with pyrotechnic girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) and fish-man Abe Sapien (Doug Jones).

Things heat up when he faces off with the evil Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), who is looking to take over, um, the world. This all leads to lots of confrontation and eventually Ireland--home of the Golden Army and site of the inevitable battle to once again make the world a safer place.