Hobo With A Shotgun* Review

You like gore? Then you’ll be in heaven. You don‘t? What the hell are you doing watching a film called Hobo with a Shotgun?

The second film to originate from the fake trailers created to promote Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (the first being the ridiculously entertaining Machete), Hobo with a Shotgun is an homage to '80s exploitation thrillers in which subtlety and restraint is held with scant regard.

The eponymous hobo (Rutger Hauer) finds himself in the delightfully named Scum Town. A haven of brutal beatings, degrading sex and sickening violence, it makes Sodom and Gomorrah look like Vatican City. At the centre of it all is the twisted Mr Drake (Brian Downey) who – along with his psychopathic sons, monstrous henchmen and the corrupt police force – keeps the few decent citizens living in constant fear. When he reaches breaking point, the hobo decides to fight back by – as the film’s tagline proudly proclaims – dispensing justice one shell at a time.

Hobo is sick pantomime taken to an absurd degree. Its clichéd story – the stranger arriving in a corrupt town to clean it up – owes as much to the western as the horror genre, and in reality is little more than a hook for various grotesque characters and situations. You’re not sure a character is evil? Fine, let’s have them barbecue a school bus full of children just so you’re sure. Is that cop corrupt because he takes a sly bribe? No, it’s because he helped carve the word ‘scum’ into somebody’s chest.

Yet this absurdity is also the film’s saving grace. From the palette of muted primary colours chosen to parody its '80s grindhouse counterparts, to the never ending gobbets of bright red blood, Hobo is too ridiculous to take seriously and – by extension – be remotely offended by.

Of course those who are squeamish need not apply. There’s no ‘let’s turn the camera away and leave it to the audience’s imagination’ here. Body parts are disintegrated, heads are often reduced to a pulpy mush while lawnmowers and ice-skates are used ways that the manufacturers surely didn’t intend.

While the majority of the acting befits the film’s low-end aspirations, Hauer really gives it his all. After a decade of Euro-trash features and Guinness ads, it’s easy to forget that that he is an amazingly charismatic screen presence. Here his performance anchors the insanity and proves that, despite knocking on in years, he can still be a convincing action star.

Nostalgia can often forgive a multitude of sins, but director Jason Eisener has written a winning love letter to the lost films of his youth with enough humour and chaos to delight any fan of the genre.