Hobo With A Shotgun is a Canadian exploitation film, based on a fake trailer made as part of a contest for Tarantino/Rodriguez’s 2007 Grindhouse project. Just as Robert Rodriguez’s own fake trailer for Machete went on to become a (fairly disappointing) full-length film, Hobo With A Shotgun has become a fully-fleshed (and then brutally de-fleshed) 86 minutes of wall-to-wall gore and obscenity.
Coming from director Jason Eisener, the same guy who brought us the fantastically over-the-top Treevenge, it is safe to assume that the aim here is to offend by any means necessary. Nothing is safe, and no line goes uncrossed. With that being said, I had a hell of a fun time watching this movie, but everyone might not feel the same, like for instance if you have no sense of humor (you’ve been warned!).
Plot-wise, just as the title suggests, this is a movie about a Hobo who owns a shotgun. Initially, the Hobo (Rutger Hauer!) is saving up money to buy a rusty old lawnmower, in order to follow his dream of owning a landscaping business. However, upon riding the rails into Hopetown/Scumtown/Fucktown (Halifax, Nova Scotia!) and seeing the awful state the place is in, the Hobo decides instead to purchase a shotgun and clean up the place, much to the delight of the audience.
Hobo With A Shotgun is a movie which relishes in the obscene and the outlandish, and is more than a little insane. Scumtown is running rampant with murderers, rapists, child-molesters, hookers, corrupt police, and even a team of demonic assassins known as The Plague. The head honcho of them all is The Drake, a fashionable lunatic with the personality of a circus ringleader who beheads anyone that disagrees with him. The Drake’s two sons Ivan and Slick, played here as an extreme take on the 80’s jock type of movie nemesis, wear Letterman jackets and sunglasses, ride a fancy Canadian sports car, powder their noses frequently, and publicly maim and murder anyone who looks at them sideways. This is what the Hobo is up against (not to mention his own insanity), and his only ally is a hooker with a heart of gold.
Overall, it was obvious that everyone involved in this film had a blast making it, and for the most part, I felt the same way about watching it. The performances are fun and campy, the cinematography is edgy and colorful in a way that would make Dario Argento happy, and the humor is very, very dark. As a huge fan of Peter Jackson’s early work, as well as the better Troma releases, the frequent and heavy use of splashy, borderline cartoonish gore brought a huge smile to my face. Everything is played for laughs here, but I was glad that it did not come off as too self-aware or ironic, and is played as more of an homage to ridiculous grindhouse cinema, rather than a parody of it.
The one thing that I was surprised to find rubbing me the wrong way was the gratuitous obscene language used by most of the scum, especially Ivan and Slick. Am I getting too old to appreciate foul language? I don’t think so. I guess I just felt that out of all the ploys to offend the audience – whether via violence, child-endangerment, misogyny, or a total lack of sympathy for any living thing – the foul language seemed to ware thin the fastest, and gave the sense that the filmmakers were much more immature than their other talents would suggest. At the same time, I suppose the idea was to make it easy to hate the villains, and their eye-roll-inducing immature dialogue indeed helped with that. I just felt that the movie could have been just as awesome and over-the-top without using quite as many curse words or sexually violent language.
At the end of the day, this is a minor drawback for a movie that otherwise tickled every cult cinema-loving bone in my body, delighted my eyes, and burned my soul. A more-than-solid 4/5.
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