Less a concept for a movie than a tasty piece of phonoaesthetics, the phrase “hobo with a shotgun” rat-a-tat-tats off the tongue like a handful of caramel clodhoppers. As an I’m-not-fucking-with-you précis, though, the line could not be more appropriately blunt: like signs hawking “Tits! Ass!” in the Times Square of our collective imagination, Hobo With A Shotgun says what it does, and does what it says.

Boy does it ever. Unlike Machete or Planet Terror, which spent the entirety of their corpulent running times winking stupidly at the audience, Hobo With A Shotgun has its cake and eats it, too. As pastiche, Hobo is both a magnificently adept invocation of a genre, and a full-firing entry in that genre at the same time: in other words, it is a fucking exact parody of the movies it is trying to parody… and yet, fucking amazing to watch, too. If you think that’s easy, try making one yourself.

Hobo starts turned up to 11, spends its second act with the dial set to 12, and is cruising past 13 before the climax unfolds. I think it is a kind of sensualist masterpiece. Photographed – yes, photographed – in lurid hues of Hell by way of the gumball machine, and populated by escapees from the punk gangs in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, this movie may not have a brain in its head or a single subtextual card to play, but whothefuckcaresohmygodlookatthething. That isn’t a dismissal of common sense, but rather a full embrace of it: it’s a movie about a hobo with a shotgun going all Yojimbo on the single worst town in the history of man, and as such, it is what it is. Notably, where in the conclusion of the original there might have been a stalwart ronin announcing “maybe now we’ll have some peace and quiet in this town,” the complementary moment in Hobo is soaked only in the banshee wails of inarticulate despair – but if that despair is in any way borne of love, then the purging fires have come, nevertheless.

At the centre of the picture, Rutger Hauer is a marvel. I doubt he’s even stretching, but he has an instinctive grasp of the shuffling gait, the indirect gaze, of the person so squalid as to be willfully invisible to the people around him – a man half here, half not. He tells marvellous stories of bears and schoolteachers, and develops a kindly bond with a nymphet streetwalker whose little body bears the abuses of the avalanche of shit that the Hobo inadvertently kicks off. Hauer is a man who knows how to deliver a soliloquy and make it count, and if the music – throughout Hobo, a work of genre reconstructionism all its own – leans in the direction of Blade Runner when the Hobo is making a room full of babies wail with harsh prognostications about their chances in the horrible town in which they live, well, so be it. It might not be the “tears in rain” speech, but Hauer can make the babbling of a half-mad bum with a gun full of shells sound like Lear railing against the hurricane.

Neophyte director Jason Eisener places his camera with excitable precision, again striking a sharp balance between dedicated duplication of the genre, and actual effective staging, never cheating an audience of Peters to pay his geek-god Paul. His film is sociopathically indecent and nauseatingly vulgar, yet has a touching chastity in lines it is unwilling to cross, happily going in for the visceral revulsion of making the Hobo chew broken glass – you’ll be picking that one out of your teeth for a week – while refusing to kowtow to the genre requisites of rape, misogyny, or feculence. His starlet, Molly Dunsworth, suffers indignities, certainly, but never has to show her breasts to prove that she’s in an exploitation movie, and if a gag involving a bus full of children and a flamethrower is as uncomfortably mean-spirited as the rest of the movie is merely thrillingly amoral, then call it a clean miss.

The infernal soundscape of Hobo With A Shotgun is as much responsible for its success as the note-perfect, candy-coloured photography. This movie is loud. It knows how to make use of a full set of movie theatre speakers. Hobo is, like its best grindhouse antecedents, a big-fucking-screen big-fucking-movie. It isn’t for home video and it isn’t much for critical analysis, either; it’s for 90 minutes in the dark and, perhaps, a healthy dose of psychodramatic catharsis. Remember when we used to go to the moviehouses to give voice to our inner primal screams, so they would not intrude upon our daylight hours? This is Hobo With A Shotgun.