Collector's Edition

Hobo with a Shotgun Blu-ray Review

Is Shotgun a blast or a misfire?

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, June 30, 2011



Hobo, with a shotgun...

Debut director Jason Eisener'sproject is already the stuff of internet legend. In 2007, Eisener heard about a promotional "fake trailer" contest for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez'collaboration, and armed with $150 bucks, some willing actors, plenty of fake blood, and an eye for '70s exploitation cinema, he introduced YouTube to the titular shotgun-wielding hobo, a homeless vigilante intent on cleaning up his homethe streets. The trailer got over a million hits and was actually attached to some prints ofin Canada. Shortly thereafter, Alliance Films approached Eisener to spin the trailer into a feature, and four years later, after much hype, what was once essentially a no-budget piece of YouTube fan art has become a proper full-length movie. But perhaps "proper" isn't the right word. Let's get this out of the way out front: if you're at all easily offendedby pedophilic Santas, decapitations, burning school buses full of children, etc.this isn't the film for you. That said, if the succinct, tell-all titleinstinctively tickles your urge for splat-stick violence and absurdist comedy, you'll probably be entertained.I say "probably" becausedoes deliver the gory, impossibly violent goodsand it's occasionally very funnybut it doesn't quite live up to its own hype. If you've seen the faux-trailer, you've basically seen the film. It all comes down to expectation. If you watched the trailer and thought, "I want more of," you'll have a blast hereparticularly if you're watching with a bunch of like-minded, mildly inebriated friendsbut if you look atsoberly, you might be left a little underwhelmed by how much better the film could've been.The wisely short 86-minute movie does have what you might loosely call a story. Our nameless Hobo, played straight-faced by formerbaddie Rutger Hauer, rides a train car into Hope Town, a suburban wasteland that's been taken over by punks, thugs, and corrupt cops. We're quickly introduced to The Drake (Brian Downey), an impresario of death and destruction who dresses like a TV evangelist and runs the town with his bratty drug-dealing sons, Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman), a pair of preppy reprobates who wear Ray-Bans and drive a sports car with gull-wing doors. The Drake rules through fear, and one of his favorite terror-inducing spectacles is to attach a custom manhole cover around the neck of a victim, drop the poor guy feet first down a manhole so that only his head is sticking out, and creatively decapitate him, leaving a spouting geyser of arterial blood. If you need additional insight into his character, his credo is: "When life hands you razor blades, you make a baseball bat covered in razor blades."The Drake also owns an arcade where delinquents play freakshow torture gameslike pulping victims' skulls between two bumper carsand its here that the Hobo takes his first stand, protecting a compassionate prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth), who gives him a place to stay. By eating glass on camera for a seedy "bum fights" videographer, the Hobo earns enough cash to buy a lawnmowerhe wants to get back on his feet by starting a landscaping businessbut while he's in the pawn shop a gang of robbers burst in and take a woman and her baby hostage. Naturally, the hobo reaches for the shotgun on the wall and blows the thieves away. "I'm going to sleep in your bloody carcasses TONIGHT!" he screams, the first of several memorable one-liners.Thus begins the Hobo's street-cleaning rampage. He's the homeless equivalent of De Niro inor Charles Bronson in, and there's a great montage of mini-vignettes where he takes out a series of evil-doers: drug dealers and sex traffickers, a pervy Santa and a pimp who specializes in under-aged girls. The hobo is lauded in the press (sample headline: "Hobo Stops Begging, Demands Change), but when The Drake threatens to kill the townsfolk's children unless they start murdering any and all street people, everyone but Abby turns on our pump- action hero.Eisener and screenwriter John Davies have clearly studied the no-budget vigilante crime fighting films of the 1970s and '80sand the Troma brand of filmmakingand it seems like their sole intent is to take the inherent sleaziness of the genre and amplify it exponentially. Everything aboutis ridiculously, deliciously over-the-top. The exploding squibs, the neon-drenched set design, the hokey dialogue, the maniacal villainsby the second act, the film has already ascended to a realm of anything-goes absurdity, where the iceskate-wearing Ivan can commit "skate rape," where Slick can take a blowtorch to a school bus full of children, and where we're introduced to "The Plague," a pair of armored android mercenaries who, at one point, do battle with a giant octopus. Really.The whole thing is gleefully anarchic, attempting to one-up itself in each new scene. This is good fun in the moment, but when you step back from the visceral thrills,seemsstudied, and this sense of self-awarenesswhile precisely the pointis what has held back these kinds of revisionist grindhouse "experiences," fromto. They simply don't have the grimy authenticity of the films they're trying to ape. Rutger Hauer, however, is the real deal. He's been in z-grade movies before, and he's the perfect choice for the Hobo, playing him with an unlikely mixture of deadpan ferocity and tenderness. There's no real social undercurrent here about homelessness, but Rutger's down-and-out performance is so effective that if I ever saw him on the streeteven knowing that he probably has a boatload of cashI'd feel moved to hand him a fiver and help him get that lawnmower he's always wanted.