Hobo With a Shotgun
★★★★
(2012)
Watching the hobo of Jason Eisener’s wonderfully titled grindhouse homage roll into Scumtown is a massive guilty pleasure for any action film affectionado. Rutger Hauer is the hobo in question; Deciding he’s had enough of the violence against the downtrodden in this mildly apocalyptic world, he takes a prostitute with a heart of gold (Molly Dunsworth) under his wing, gleefully blasts his way through countless bad guys on the mean streets and aims both barrels at the king pin of Scum Town, Drake (Brian Downey).
It’s not a film which needs a massive amount of explanation. For better or worse it really does do exactly what it says on the tin. It’s sometimes as terrifying as it is hilarious to see how far Eisener will push the gore in Hobo with a shotgun. It’s not enough to pull off a mans head with barbed wire, he has to then throw in a near orgasmic bikini clad lady to take a blood shower in the mess of it all. The script is ludicrously misogynistic, vulgar and painfully over the top, matching the films eye-popping colour for intensity and comedy.
Hauer is quite brilliant as the gruff and grizzled Hobo (never more so in fact), as he stalks the scum of scum town, delivering line after line of purposly terrible, dialogue, including a wonderful speech to a room of incubated new born babies. There is a pathos to him which somehow manges to hold more weight that seems possible in a film so jam packed with bile, but in the end it balances it’s spectacular gore with so many offensive gags its hard to be shocked by the violence at all.
Better, funnier and darker than Deathproof, Planet Terror and Machete put together; Hobo With a Shotgun is a great, snotty, vile, tongue in cheek love letter to anyone who watched bucket-loads of terrible 80’s B grade action films on repeat with the curtains drawn while the rest of the world had a summer. Be offended, be very offended.
Hobo With a Shotgun opens in the US this week, but UK gore fans will have to wait until July to witness the sickness.
