Movies Reviews

Hobo with a Shotgun – Movie Review

By Ron Wilkinson May 18, 2011, 22:06 GMT

A homeless vigilante blows away crooked cops, pedophile Santas, and other scumbags with his trusty pump-action shotgun. ...more

“Hobo With a Shotgun” is about a hobo with a shotgun. If you are looking for more than splatter, look elsewhere.

If you want or expect anything other than a righteous, kitschy blood fest, stay away from this intentionally self-satirizing gutbucket of sadistic gun worship. Bang-bang, the bad guys are dead and so are many other people.

The film stops and starts as if trying to figure out why the good guys were killing the bad guys. Remind me again. In fact, remind me who the good guys are and who are the bad guys.

Rutger does not care and neither should you, if you expect to make it through all 84 minutes of slicing, dicing, burning and churning that make up this gumbo of every splatter, horror and spaghetti Western movie ever made.

Written by the trio that did the fake “Hobo With a Shotgun” trailer in between the two “Grindhouse” films “Machete” and “Planet Terror, this is the compendium of rending ‘em. The A to Z of misogyny. The amen of mayhem. This is starting to sound like Drake, the pater familiar of the greatest crime family in the universe---the man who makes the Godfather look like the Good Fairy.

Drake is played lovingly by Brian Downey. Downey channels The Joker with purty good success and screenwriters John Davies, Jason Eisener and Rob Cotterill figure out a few bloody tricks to put up his sleeve. His two sons, Slick (Gregory Smith---son Thomas in “The Patriots”) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) steal the show, doing most of the dastardly heavy lifting, flaying and burning alive of the unfortunate victims.

The trio comes off as the Ma Barker gang trapped in the set of “Clockwork Orange.”

Speaking of sets, this film has some great sets. The city is half Gotham and half Sodom and Gomorrah. The graffiti on the walls threatens self-destruction, exclaims self-hate and there is even a couple lines telling viewers not to be true to their school. This film has no sense of boundaries.

Well, in fact it does have boundaries. Men and women are treated as equal opportunity victims and perps. The two heroes that bring law and order to the chaos are the Hobo (Rutger Hauer) and his female prostitute sidekick. There is much sexual abuse threatened but none shown.

The infamous rape in “High Plains Drifter is more graphic than anything in this film. The hobo could be viewed as Christ the savior and the prostitute as Mary Magdalene. Or perhaps they could be Hitler and Eva Braun, which ever turns you on the most. But when she welds those axe heads to those power lawnmower blades there is a lot that gets trimmed beyond the parking strip.

The filming is imaginative, dark and gloomy, while at the same time betraying a sense of energy and, dare it be said, optimism. The opening theme song could be something from “The Sound of Music.”

One expects Julie Andrews to come popping out of that boxcar singing “Favorite Things” instead of the hobo coming out and skillfully draining the rotten beer from a bottle and cadging the butt therein. Beauty is all in the eye of the beholder, my friend.

The overall effect is Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” with back-up music by Lawrence Welk. Sure to throw even the most jaded of flying blood and flesh aficionados off guard.

The film appears to be Not Rated, for continuous scenes extending for 30 minutes or more consisting completely of shredded and dismembered body parts. Actually, if the filmmakers even so much as submitted this to be rated, the lords of the MPAA would probably have their heads explode.

Unfortunately, towards the end of the film, director/writer Jason Eisener and his merry band of fantasists run out of ideas and things flag a bit (Gosh, the trailer for “Grindhouse” was a lot easier than a whole film). Total predictability is the downfall of this flick. Poor taste be damned, it is the lack of surprises that run this steam punk nautilus aground.

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Directed by: Jason Eisener
Written by: John Davies, Jason Eisener and Rob Cotterill
Starring: Rutger Hauer, Pasha Ebrahimi and Robb Wells 
Release Date: May 6, 2011
MPAA: Not Rated
Runtime: 84 minutes
Country: Canada / USA
Language: English
Color: Color