Mark Kermode: Despite the claims of gun lobbyists that "an armed society is a polite society", there's plenty of evidence that keeping a firearm in your house makes it a more (rather than less) dangerous place to live. In the gripping opening movement of this self-consciously pulpy, 80s-set thriller, fidgety father and husband Richard Dane (Michael C Hall, shedding the killer instinct of his title role in Dexter) loads and then accidentally discharges his daddy's gun, responding with trembling hands to the sound of an intruder. In the aftermath of the shooting, which messily redecorates the Danes' living room in tones far from floral, Richard is hailed a local hero by the east Texan townsfolk who previously held his manhood in doubt. But death is never blood simple and even low-life scumbags have relatives, in this case, grizzled ex-con Ben (Sam Shepard) who comes looking for familial vengeance and finds more than he bargained for.

The fourth feature from writer/director team Nick Damici and Jim Mickle is an altogether more masculine, mainstream affair than their previous outing, We Are What We Are. In that under-appreciated remake of Jorge Michel Grau's bleak Mexican cannibal movie, Damici and Mickle flipped the gender roles, following the story's matriarchal threads with impressively subversive results. Here, they have fun with the macho stereotypes of hard-bitten potboilers, pitching an uncertain dork who has apparently never before wielded a gun into a world in which real men shoot first and ask questions later. "Must be hard for a man like you," says a sneering cop (played by Damici), surveying the crimson results of Richard's newly discovered trigger finger. "A civilian, I mean," he corrects himself, although he clearly meant nothing of the sort.

Based on the novel by Joe R Lansdale, whose knowingly absurdist prose provided the source material for the undead Elvis and JFK horror comedy, Bubba Ho-Tep, this intermittently spicy, shape-shifting romp revels in its wildly veering tonal jolts, flipping like a catfish on a pole as it struggles to evade genre definition.

What starts out as a throwback neo-noir (think John Dahl's Red Rock Westwith a hint of Carl Franklin's One False Move) mutates variously into good-ole boy slapstick (enter Don Johnson in a white stetson and fire-apple red convertible), earnest, hard-boiled grit (Shepard looming menacingly over the beds of sleeping children and the grave of his recently departed son) and video-nasty era sleazy urban legend (more Snuff than 8mm).

In some ways, the film forms a flipside companion piece to David Cronenberg's A History of Violence, another tale of a quiet man drawn into a world of comic-strip brutality, littered with broken-backed narrative left turns that wrong-foot the audience, leaving them wondering how much of this is but a bloody, fevered dream.

Sticking very specifically to the original time frame of Lansdale's 1989 novel, Cold in July plays out to a soundtrack that counterposes short blasts of mullet-haired soft-rock with squidgy analogue electronica, the latter pitched somewhere between Giorgio Moroder's score for Midnight Express and John Carpenter's homemade Halloween riffs. Like the VHS videotapes that become an integral part of the plot (and indeed the briefcase-size "portable" phone on which Johnson's caricatured Jim Bob signally fails to get a signal), Jeff Grace's music nails the narrative in the period before the dawn of the digital age, when it was still possible for weird stuff to happen without everybody finding out about it and social networking meant having a beer in a bar with someone on whom you couldn't run a quick Google search. A soundtrack album of Grace's music is available on iTunes, although the idea of downloading it seems oddly anachronistic – surely this is one you'd want to own on vinyl?

As always, what defines Mickle and Damici's work is their genre literacy; from the low-budget shivers of Mulberry St to the western-gothic inflections of Stake Land and the insular satire of We Are What We Are, their movies are rooted in the dank, fertile soil of fandom, a term I invoke as a compliment rather than criticism.

Although Cold in July doesn't entirely hang together as it slips recklessly between the gruelling, the goofy and the gory (sometimes the shifts work against the story, undercutting rather than enhancing the tension), the attention to detail is devilish, from the understated horrors of Hall's excruciating 80s hair and tache arrangement, to the nostalgic splatter palette of the overcooked third act, stills from which wouldn't look out of place in a well-thumbed back-issue of Fangoria.

As for the performances, they're ripe and rich, even though the three core characters sometimes appear to be starring in entirely different movies. While Johnson has a hoot building on the self-parody that has given his career a second wind, Shepard plays it straight as the man with little to say and even less to lose. But it's Hall who steals the show, pitching it just right as an emasculated antihero seduced by the dinosaurs of old-school machismo, learning ugly lessons about what it means to walk like a man.