HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
Canada, 2010, 85 minutes, Colour.
Rutger Hauer
Directed by Jason Eisener.
A very ugly film.
It started as a jokey interlude, some false trailers inserted into the intermission space in the Quentin Tarantino- Robert Rodriguez homage to 70s exploitation drive-in features, Grindhouse. Canadian Jason Eisener submitted one, Hobo with a Shotgun, which was used in the Canadian release of Grindhouse. These trailers were more entertaining than Tarantino’s Death Proof or Rodriguez Planet Terror which comprised Grindhouse. But the jokes have gone beyond the joke with 2010’s Machete, a slasher drama with Rodriguez himself turning a trailer into a feature film. Now, Eisener has ‘developed’ it into a full-length Hobo with a Shotgun.
He takes the title very literally. Rutger Hauer is a vagrant who rides the trains and arrives at a town, ironically called Hope City, which is a mixture of normalcy and anarchy (filmed in Nova Scotia!). Audiences of straight-to-DVD actioners will appreciate the presence of Hauer in so many films like this. The Hobo discovers the ugly side of town which is controlled by a gangster who owns a nightclub and his two absolutely disreputable sons. The many confrontations are staged with sneers, snarls, facial grimaces of disdain – which are so in your face that they seem either stupid or funny or both. The Hobo rarely smiles.
He encounters a young prostitute exploited by the gangsters who takes the Hobo in when he has been violently roughed up (which happens more than once). While local TV reports the chaos, while the locals just stand round intimidated or run away, the Hobo starts on a vigilante mission not of reform but of clearing and cleaning the town of human garbage (including the corrupt police in cahoots with the gangsters). Which is what he does with R 18 graphic violence in close-up – with so much brutality and so many weapons that it is disgustingly preposterous and perverse, which can raise glee for audiences who lap up this kind of thing.
The film is obviously in sympathy with the need for cleansing evils (a striking scene is of a pervert dressed as Santa Claus spying with binoculars at children in a playground – then a goodbye Santa blast, where Santa is an anagram of Satan). However, it follows the Grindhouse lead of slambang action and full-on violence – and torture – to make things right.
Eisener is a better editor (putting both the slam and the bang into his cross-cutting) than he is director. While he does capture the look of the old exploitation films, bright technicolour, the dingy interiors, the squalid exteriors, the seemingly ham performances of the cast in trash dialogue and action, it leaves the audience with the jokey exploitation, focusing on the film itself without much felt need to go beyond it.
