A blast: "Hobo with a Shotgun"

Somehow, the Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino Grindhouse project has spawned spin-offs more consistently imaginative and entertaining than either Death Proof or Planet Terror were in themselves. Following on the heels of Machete - which used the exploitation format to say something about U.S. immigration policy, and to give craggy-faced character actor Danny Trejo a long-overdue signature role - we have the Canadian triumph Hobo with a Shotgun, which derives from the winner of a short-film contest used to promote Grindhouse online, and offers a showcase for none other than Rutger Hauer (whose terrific cameo in 2003's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind didn't lead to the career revival it merited) as the itinerant who pushes his shopping cart into the wrong town.

In a crime- and vice-riddled grothole lorded over by a corrupt media tycoon with political connections (oh, the timing), Hauer's Hobo comes to seem a grizzled paragon of decency, clinging to the remnants of a better life: his one, modest dream is to own a lawnmower, even though there's no longer a blade of grass to be seen thereabouts. The Hobo comes to equip himself with the weapon of the title only after the pawn shop he's browsing in gets held up by masked assailants; so virtuous is he that - even after seeing off those intruders in bloody fashion - he feels obliged to pay the cowering shopkeeper for the still-smoking firearm.

The title's just about the most sensible element; everything else is gloriously, unapologetically OTT, from the gaudy, retinal-burning Technicolor (made for effusive spurts of crimson gore) to the off-the-leash supporting players spitting out the year's saltiest dialogue ("You're so hot, you make me wanna cut my dick off and rub it all over your titties"). Writer John Davies and director Jason Eisener sneak in deft thumbnail character sketches, like the pimp who tries to stop his girls from doing homework, or the pederast dressed as Santa Claus, but much of it is geared towards excess: the pinnacle may be the 1980s-styled lair of the tycoon's psychopathic jock sons, an amusement arcade where new ways to crush enemy extremities are tested (the head-between-dodgem cars is the obvious crowdpleaser) and weapons-grade cocaine is hoovered up off the consoles of Pong-like videogames.

It should, in all honesty, be indefensible trash - and yet the writer-director team infuse this parable with an unexpected notion of civic pride, inviting us to cheer the righteous yet weary Hobo (Hauer quietly carving out a memorable character for himself) as he goes about putting at the wrong end of his weapon individuals who really rather deserve their fate: a particular contempt is reserved for the creators of those Bumfight videos that were so in vogue among braying yahoos a few years ago.

Crucially, Eisener and Davies invest the story with a sense of jeopardy and peril that gets Hobo well past the parodic thinness Rodriguez and (especially) Tarantino are prone to: having the jocks take a flamethrower to a bus full of schoolchildren is a funny black joke, but it lays the groundwork for the genuinely transgressive scene where the Hobo lectures a ward full of newborn babies as to their bleak prospects in this - or any - town. Nobody's likely to mistake it for The King's Speech, but this is a hell of a calling card, and closer than anything else I've seen recently to the look, feel and deranged energy of the best Corman B-pictures of the late 70s and 1980s: it's so good it might even have got away with being in 3D.

Hobo with a Shotgun opens nationwide from Friday.