Back in 2007, Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez brought back the exploitation genre with their brilliantly silly Grindhouse, a double bill consisting of a number of fake trailers sandwiched in between the two features. With the online buzz surrounding the movie, they ran a contest for the best fan-made fake trailer, which Jason Eisener and his buddies ended up winning. That victory, along with a gloriously depraved short film Treevenge, led Eisener to make his first feature film, Hobo with a Shotgun.
Set in Scum Town, known better by the locals as Fuck Town, rape and murder runs rampant. One day, a hobo tries to buy a lawnmower. It is an emotional moment, his hope for a new life finally about to become true, but he is interrupted when some local youths hold up the shop. The hobo sees a shotgun above the lawnmower, and his quest to clean up the city begins.
The screenplay revels in insanity. The bad dialogue is as hilarious and quotable as any frat-boy comedy and the violence is incredibly creative, with bumper cars, manhole covers, lawnmowers, severed bones, toasters and ice-skating boots, along with the obligatory shotgun, being used in ways they never have been before,. Rodriguez thought he had balls when he killed a kid off screen in Planet Terror, but the sight of a school-bus being torched with a flamethrower to the sounds of “Burn Baby Burn” is beyond anything I have ever seen. And yet the film feels cleverly done, taking it beyond any other semi-mainstream entertainment film ever has before with its deliberate tastelessness.
The acting is so incredibly silly that it’s hard to call it anything other than incredible. Rutger Hauer is brilliant as the mock-heroic Hobo that delivers his incredible dialogue with such geniunity that he deserves a shout-out as one of the unsung comedians of the piece. The rest of the cast support him brilliantly, Bateman, Downey and Smith are gleefully evil in their joyously disgusting antics, but the standout supporting performance is from Molly Dunsworth, a prostitute whose battle with The Drake and his sons is just as motivating as the Hobo’s.
Cinematographer Karim Hussain has created an amazing visual feast with colours that could be straight out of a Giallo film, and Darius Holbert and Russ Howard III do a fantastic job with the score, bringing back the joyfully cheesy sounds of the eighties that compliment the insane tone of the film perfectly.
The tongue-in-cheek exploitation rehash has been done to death since the release of Grindhouse, yet Jason Eisener brings forth a vibrant, original and thrilling film that is bursting with energy, taking the genre to a whole new level. The film is reminiscent of everything from The Warriors to Suspiria, Taxi Driver to Evil Dead II, but whether you’re a hardcore exploitation fan or new to this compelling vein of cinema, Hobo with a Shotgun will be a fresh and exciting experience.
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