Talk about a blast from the past. Men With Guns, a rip-snortin', Canadian-made, B-movie that kicked up dust in the Toronto filmfest two years ago, is finally back on screen. Not a moment too soon. This frenzied flick is fun. It thunders and rocks and bleeds with the best of them.

Director Kari Skogland's effort also features a surprisingly poignant performance by Callum Keith Rennie as a taciturn junkie with a big heart and a penchant for being in all the wrong places at all the wrong times when the action goes down. B-movies don't usually boast such sensitive moments. Must be the woman's touch in a male movie genre (and Skogland was pregnant when she took over direction of the movie).

Not so incidentally, this testosterone-driven, sex & drugs crazed flick is not to be confused with the John Sayles film that is also called Men With Guns and which also made its world premiere at the 1997 Toronto festival.

The Sayles film, a drama about the persecution of Amerindian farmers in Latin American, has already been released. Skogland's Men With Guns was thrown into limbo because of the demise of the Toronto production house Norstar, which was swallowed up by Alliance.

Now that the movie has been given new life, don't dismiss it as mere trash. It is trashy. And it is peopled with a lot of trashy characters who do nasty things. That's a good thing, because there is a style, a charm and a wisdom about it all that makes Men With Guns just a tiny bit transcendent.

The story revolves around two total losers played effectively by Donal Logue and Gregory Sporleder. After a run-in with a houseful of dismal thugs who beat the tar out of them, our two anti-heroes are out for revenge.

Being cowards at heart, they need heavy artillery. Rennie's dissolute character has the right contacts and the three men end up armed to the teeth and ready for bear. In the inevitable battle that ensues, a lot of people die.

That sets off the film's main narrative, a drama involving a huge stash of cocaine, some party-hearty interludes and a tragi-comic climax triggered by the powerful gangster (played with his usual conviction by Paul Sorvino) who owned that stash before our losers got their grubby paws on it.

The actual gunplay is staged with panache. But it would be an empty gesture, of course, if Skogland didn't help turn Lachy Hulme's action script into an emotional drama as well.

Amazingly, we learn to care about the characters. I wouldn't want these pea-brained, gob-smacked degenerates as friends, but Skogland's efforts really did make me care about how their pathetic saga turns out. And it is a blast!