HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN is a cinematic kamikaze mission that will delight fans of grindhouse revenge movies, violent camp and extreme splatterpunk. Flipping through Netflix last night and I came across “Hobo with a Shotgun”. I had just heard of it, actually reading a short interview with star Rutger Hauer in Entertainment Weekly, so I didn’t have high expectations this would be some kind of Oscar-worthy great film. All I wanted out of Hobo with a Shotgun was to be entertained… and boy, did it deliver in spades.
This is the movie I can imagine Quentin Tarantino making as a teenager, breaking into the Troma studios in the middle of the night after eating a whole bag of ‘shrooms. There is lots of graphic violence (most of it way, way over the top) and totally deranged characters, but Rutger Hauer’s completely sincere performance as the titular hobo is what drives this film. I’m not saying his acting is great in this movie, but it’s no worse than Stallone in “Rambo” and much more compelling. Don’t even get me started on the trio of villains, who may have been paid in crank to appear on camera. Other than Hauer, there’s nobody else I recognized other than
Rob Wells, probably best known as “Ricky” from the raunchy hit Canadian TV series “Trailer Park Boys,” who makes a cameo as a guy who gets decapitated with a barbed wire noose while imprisoned in a manhole cover fashioned around his neck for just such a reason.
Lovers of grindhouse will dig this movie and director Jason Eisener obviously knows his audience. The brilliance of this movie, and yes, I do mean brilliance, is that you just keep watching because you have to know what’s going to happen next. Watching this movie made me wonder if I should write some grindhouse revenge novels…. hmmmm… something to think about. Chamber me another shell, hobo. Let’s rip this town to shreds.
