Hobo with a Shotgun

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Hobo with a Shotgun

June 9th 2011 03:40

Is this possibly the sleaziest movie ever to play the Sydney Film Festival asked "Freak Me Out" curator Richard Kuipers to the packed cinema audience last night. It’s likely, but then Ex Drummer (2007) would certainly give it a run for its money. Still, Hobo with a Shotgun (2010) isn’t panning for arthouse gold as that Danish indulgence did so vehemently, instead this vigilante monster is channeling the grindhouse exploitation aesthetic with a vengeance, but with its severed tongue lodged firmly in its cheek. Hobo with a Shotgun is a balls-to-the-wall, ultraviolent, spit in the face of good taste, and done with honest-to-goodness gory glee and sheer reckless abandon. It's sleaze candy shoved in the mouth and sucked on hard.

Rutger Hauer as the hobo with a shotgun

Director Jason Eisener, who made the hilariously inventive short Treevenge (2008), came to prominence when his fake trailer, Hobo with a Shotgun, won the Grindhouse competition set up by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino in 2007. The 2-minute clip ended up on the Canadian release of Grindhouse (and eventually on a special Region 1 DVD edition). When Treevenge started winning festival awards Canadian distribution company Alliance decided Mr. Eisener should be given funding for a feature; and the result is Hobo with a Shotgun, the full-length movie!

Molly Dunsworth as Abby

The plot is as simple as Simon; a nameless bum (Rutger Hauer) rides into Hope Town (the sign has been vandalized to read Scum Town) on a boxcar and begins collecting recyclables in a shopping trolley so that he can get enough cash to buy a lawnmower (he has pipe dreams of starting his own grass-cutting business). He immediately runs afoul of the local henchmen, Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman), the Tom Cruise a la Risky Business lookalike brothers of local crime lord Drake (Brian Downey). In rescuing young hooker-with-a-heart Abby (Molly Dunsworth) from the sleazy clutches of Slick our grizzled anti-hero becomes prime meat for the pounding and slicing.

Hobo with a Shotgun Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith

Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith) with a contestant

With the word “scum” etched into his chest our resilient Hobo bites the bullet (and much broken glass) and earns enough bob from a street snuff maker to get him that lawnmower, but three armed robbers with extreme violence on their agenda changes his mind and instead he spends the $49.99 on a shotgun and blows them bastards away. Now, he’s like a bear with a taste for human blood, and it’s all on for the young and old.

Brian Downey as Drake

It’s very obvious the kinds of movies the director and screenwriter John Davies are paying tribute to – homage, if you will allow such lofty descriptions – and there are numerous references, nods, nudges, winks, and friendly slaps. The whole colour palette (courtesy of cinematographer Karim Hussain shooting on the Red digital camera) is saturated in primary colours and immediately Argento’s Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) came to mind. The opening title sequence is reminiscent of those cheese-dripping B-movies with the string music trying to lull you into a false serenity (the calm before the storm) and the pretty imagery. But soon enough Hobo with a Shotgun thrusts you into a cesspool of ugliness and crassness, with loud noise, garish colours, obnoxious characters, and graphic violence. But hell, that’s what we came for!

One half of The Plague

It’s the kind of movie Ozpolitation legend Brian Trenchard-Smith might have made if he’d been living in Los Angeles and decided to make a movie reflecting the savage streets, but with a coarse sense of humour to keep things afloat (in fact, Dead End Drive-in (1986) was one of Eisener's visual inspirations). And therein lies the most obvious difference between Hobo with a Shotgun and the actual grindhouse flicks from the late 70s and early 80s, Eisner and Davies movie is essentially a spoof, whereas the original movies weren’t played for laughs (although they’d no doubt get many an unintentional guffaw if played to contemporary audiences).

Hobo with a Shotgun Gregory Smith and Rutger Hauer

Slick at the hobo's mercy and wounded Abby in tow

The acting is dodgy at best with Rutger holding his own just, and much of the dialogue is pretty ropey, with a few choice one-liners (“When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades,” spouts Drake, and to demonstrate he swings one such weapon hard against a victim hanging upside down completely eviscerating him). The entire movie plays out in its own fucked-up world, and in the last third pushes boundaries of reality further when Drake’s uber-killing duo, Rip and Grinder AKA The Plague are sent in to secure the rogue hobo for Drake’s arena of human destruction and are seen trying to keep some kind of Lovecraftian tentacled beastie contained in a cell (!)

Hobo with a Shotgun comic-book style movie poster

The special effects make-up is impressive and, in a nod to Peter Jackson’s Braindead (1991), there’s a standout gruesome hand and arm injury via lawnmower rotary blades, oh yes, the movie really warranted that last gore-kick to the groin! Wisely Eisener didn’t submit his movie to the MPAA and made the reasonably safe assumption that the unrated version would be distributed effectively. Of course down under the movie will get slapped with an R18 I’m sure. Arguably it’s more enjoyable than Machete (2010), certainly more extreme. Now I wait (im)patiently for Eli Roth to get off his ass and make my favourite of the Grindhouse fake trailers, Thanksgiving, into an equally filthy, no-holds-barred slasher flick.

Here’s the trailer:

Here's the original Grindhouse fake trailer: