The B-movie energy that pulses through this grindhouse wallow is not to be denied. Hobo With a Shotgun lives up to its lurid, cheap-ass title. What you see is what you get. And what you get is Rutger Hauer, everyone's favorite Blade Runner replicant, enjoying the hell out of himself as the grizzled hobo.

Get more news, reviews and interviews from Peter Travers on The Travers Take

No sooner does the old bugger step off a train in the lawless Scum Town (Nova Scotia) than murdering creeps get all up in his face. The baddies think nothing of incinerating a school bus. Even Santa is a pedophile. The hobo claims he just wants to buy a lawn mower and earn money cutting grass, not a blade of which is seen anywhere in these parts. Instead, he grabs a shotgun, which comes in handier. Scum Town's leading psycho, Drake (Brian Downey), has two sons — Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) — who like to round up bums, stick their heads out of manholes and decapitate them with rope and bumper cars.

The Complete Archive: Over 20 Years of Peter Travers' Movie Reviews Now Online

No, Dorothy, we're not in Kansas anymore. Which is just how director Jason Eisener likes it. It was Eisener who created the bogus Hobo trailer for Canadian showings of 2007's Grindhouse, from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. Blood gushes in surreal splendor. And Hauer, his face a definition of craggy, is killer good. He gets big laughs where you least expect them, like in a hospital nursery. This is one nutty town, also occupied by a giant octopus and a robot army. Moralists, beware. Hobo looks like a garish cartoon puked up by a filmmaker overstuffed with cheap thrills and celluloid scuzz. What's not to like?

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."