Try not to begrudge James Gunn the fact that his Super has arrived a bit late to the recent party of "real life" superhero films. Yes, there have been a bunch lately, this is true, but if we stopped watching cop shows because they've been done before ... well, we'd miss a lot of good TV. So, yes, we've had Special, Defendor and Kick Ass in recent years but this one is different. This one has The Office's Rainn Wilson bashing people in the face with a pipe wrench.

Frank has a pretty shitty life. He's kind of funny looking and not particularly smart. He's been picked on and bullied for his entire life and works in a dead end job as a fry cook at a dingy local diner. After a life of mediocrity - or worse - Frank has only two moments that he is proud of. There is the time he steered a police officer towards the suspect he was chasing. And there is the day he married his beautiful wife, Sarah (Liv Tyler).

But now Sarah is gone, the recovering addict falling under the spell of gold-toothed, bad-moustached local drug dealer Jacques (Kevin Bacon). And now Frank is all alone. He goes to the police, reasoning that Jacques has stolen his wife. But they won't help him. He considers getting a pet, but he'd probably just screw that up. He throws himself sobbing on the hood of Jacques' car, but that just earns him a kicking. He doesn't know what to do, really, until one day he is bathed in a bright light, tentacles emerge from the walls and cut his skull open, the finger of God touches his exposed brain and he has a vision of Christian superhero The Holy Avenger (Nathan Fillion) explaining that he has been "chosen".

And so the Crimson Bolt is born. Really nothing but Frank in a homemade suit with a pipe wrench for a weapon, the Crimson Bolt sets out to clean crime off the streets of his fair city. To clean it by bashing it hard. Tales of the masked vigilante begin to fill news reports and soon the Crimson Bolt begins to feel that he is ready to tackle Jacques and his gang. Except for the bit about a pipe wrench not being much use against guns. And so after one failed attempt and with the help of an eager sidekick - the geeky girl at the comic book shop played with eager sociopathy by Ellen Page - and a new supply of heavy armaments, The Crimson Bolt sets out to restore to Frank what is rightly his.

Enormously violent, vulgar, profane and frequently very, very funny, Super is the punk rock, trash-talking cousin of Kick Ass. Made on a fraction of the budget of the Mathew Vaughn picture with little regard for normal studio expectations for this sort of thing by a film maker who once cut his teeth working for the patron saint of American trash cinema -- that'd be Troma's Lloyd Kaufman, who appears in a cameo -- Super relies on equal parts violence, comedy and heart to match what Kick Ass accomplished with high priced special effects. Wilson is a fantastic choice to bring us Frank, a man teetering between grief and outright psychosis, while Kevin Bacon plays Jacques with glee. But as strong as those two are, it's the girls who really steal the show. Liv Tyler -- always underrated, in my book -- provides the film with its emotional heart while Ellen Page is absolutely demented and weirdly sexy as Libby / Boltie, desperately eager both to please Frank and to inflict grievous bodily harm.

As was the case with Slither, writer-director James Gunn proves himself remarkably adept at changing and juggling moods. Yeah, this is a cult film through and through, but Gunn injects a surprising amount of legitimate heart and soul into all of the madness, Frank's grief at losing the one good thing he had in his life putting a tragic face on the man as he struggles to maintain any sort of grip on himself. As squishy as the effects may get -- which is very -- Gunn somehow manages to keep hold of the heart of his characters.

Though I'm not one to confuse business with quality, it's worth noting that Super was the first film of this year's Toronto International Film Festival to spark a significant bidding war, the film eventually being picked up by IFC in the US for a seven figure deal. And while money may not always follow quality, this is one of those cases where it very definitely does. This is good, good stuff.