HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (2011)

DIRECTED by Jason Eisener 

SCREENPLAY by John Davies based on "Hobo With A Shotgun" fake trailer from Rodriguez and Tarantino's "Grindhouse" by Jason Eisener, John Davies and Rob Cotterill.

STARRING - Rutger Haur as The Hobo (with a shotgun),  Molly Dunsworth as Abby,  Brian Downey as The Drake,  Gregory Smith as Slick,  Nick Bateman as Ivan,  Nick Bateman and Peter Simas as Rip and Grinder a.k.a The Plague, Rob Wells as Logan,  Jeremy Akerman as Chief of Police.

PLOT - A nameless Hobo who has been travelling the roads of America for years arrives in the seedy city of "Scum Town", outwardly a peaceful man the Hobo is sickened at what he finds in his new location. "Scum Town" is ruled with a rod of iron by crime boss - The Drake and his two psychotic sons - Slick and Ivan. In "Scum Town" nobody is safe, even the local police force are corrupt and controlled by The Drake.

It doesn't take long for the Hobo to fall foul of The Drake and his sons when he steps in to save a young prostitute - Abby - from being raped by Slick. The Hobo and Abby become friends, looking out for each other - all the Hobo has to do is raise enough money to buy a lawn mower from a second-hand store so that he can set up his own gardening business and take himself and Abby away from this hellhole. Fate has other ideas though...

The Hobo goes to buy his mower but finds the shop being held up by robbers, instead of buying his mower and pursuing his dreams the Hobo takes up arms and gets himself a shotgun. The Hobo becomes a one-man army, vowing to clean up the streets of "Scum Town" one shell at a time. The Drake has other ideas though and sends a pair of demonic cyborg assasains known as The Plague to stop him...

DIALOUGE  -  The Hobo - "I'm gonna sleep in your bloody carcasses tonight !!!", "Put the knife away kid, or I'll use it to cut welfare cheques from your rotten skin !!!!", "Jerk off to THIS, you child molesting shitlicker !!!" and many, many more...

PERFORMANCES  - Hobo With A Shotgun takes the classic Speghetti Western trope of "mysterious stranger rides into town to dispense justice" and flips it on it's head by transporting it into a modern day (or near future) setting of urban decay and crime.

As such Haur's Hobo has the classic air of a "man with no name" style gunslinger about him...just fallen on hard times. We learn next to nothing about his past, we don't even know his name. All we know is that he's been living on the road for years (maybe decades), he has a deep understanding and love of wild bears and that he harbours a simple dream of one day escaping the streets and becoming a gardener. Its this humble yet niave dream that helps the audience get on board with his character and sympathise with him as we follow him down his road to becoming a one liner spitting vigilante action hero.

Haur plays the part with tongue firmly in his cheek but also adds a seething rawness to the character. You really wouldn't want to get on this guy's wrong side. It's a brilliantly crazed performance, especially the scene where the Hobo addresses a ward full of peacefully sleeping newborn babies and delivers a monologue about how they're probably all going to grow up to be pimps and pushers despite thier parents best hopes and dreams for them. As this monologue continues the sleeping babies all wake up and start crying. It's both nihilistic and incredibly funny at the same time. Haur just gets the balance perfectly right.

Haur also gets some good scenes with Molly Dunsworth who plays Abby. Abby is a young lady who's also down on her luck and has had to become a sex worker to survive. She helps the Hobo after he's badly beaten up and knifed by The Drakes sons and the two develop what turns out to be quite a touching friendship for an otherwise O.T.T grindhouse pastiche. It's almost a father and daughter style relationship they develop, both parties want to look after the other and the Hobo acts as a mentor and an inspiration to Abby.

In the film's final scenes Abby herself becomes a shotgun toting rabble rouser as she leads a ragtag mob of city folk in an uprising against the oppressive gangster Drake. Its a good performance from Dunsworth - as with Haur it's a very comic booky character she's playing but she gives Abby some genuine heart and soul all the same.

Onto the villians now. First we get Brian Downey as The Drake - self styled "king" of "Scum Town". He's an old school stereotyped Mafiosa right down to his sharp suits and slicked back hair. He's also a hate filled psycopath - a man who thinks nothing of beheading his own brother in front of a bunch of terrified citizens just to keep them in line.

As with the other characters he's completely over the top (in a good way). Imagine Joe Pesci on acid appearing in a pantomime and you'll have some idea as to how Downey approaches the role. He's a great B-movie villain.

Then we get Drakes two sons - Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) - who if anything are even more depraved than thier old man. Slick is the number one son - his father's favourite - and I think it's safe to say that the apple hasn't fallen very far from that particular tree. Slick is a sadistic bully and a rapist, at one point he callously murders a bus load of school kids by burning them alive with a flamethrower. Ivan is the runt of the litter, always seeking his father's approval and never getting it, he's forever in his brother's shadow, a constant disappointment to Drake. He's slightly less evil than Slick I suppose, but not by much. Both of them are incredibly cocky and stupid in equal measure.

Finally we get The Plague (one of whom is also played by Bateman) - the Plague are two assasains - part demon, part robot. They're implied to be several centuries old and have been employed as supernatural hitmen down the ages (a list of thier past kills shows both Abraham Lincoln and Jesus Christ himself to be previous hits), they appear to live in some kind of gothic castle and have a pet Lovecraftian Cthulu-esque monster living with them that they like to wrestle with. It's every bit as brain meltingly bonkers as it sounds, but Hobo With A Shotgun is just that type of movie.

SFX - Gore, gore and more gore (see below). 

The Plague are an interesting design, looking like old school 50's sci-fi robots with a paramilitary makeover. I'm also quite partial to the rubber tentacle they battle with in thier lair.

SEX & VIOLENCE  - This film has plenty of both. There's gratuitous amounts of female nudity. At one point a man gets decapitated and a semi-naked hooker showers in his spraying blood, clearly getting turned on as she's doing so. Like I said it's that kind of movie...

People get shot, stabbed, beaten and broken. A peadophile Santa Claus gets his head blown off. A Prisoner gets his head smashed to a pulp between two Dodgem cars. At one point the Hobo is forced to eat broken glass. Slick and Ivan flamethrower a bus load of kids to death...but that's OK because later on the Hobo shoots Slick in the testicles, as Slick lays dying a blackened smoking schoolbus populated by blackened, smoking zombie schoolkids pulls up to give him a lift straight to Hell. Abby looses a hand but uses the broken bone of her stump to stab Drake in retaliation. The Hobo wastes every criminal in sight but (strangely) never seems to run out of ammo. All this and much, much, MUCH more.

If all this sounds ridiculously gratuitous and silly then that's because it is (in the best possible way). Like I said it's just that kind of film...

RATING  - Hobo With A Shotgun is an absolute blast. It's fast, furious, trashy, darkly funny and yet has a heart to it. It's a love letter to both 70's/80's exploitation cinema and violent comics. It's sure to offend many, many people but that's what's so great about it. Everything is played far too safely today, nobody wants to risk offending anybody for fear of being criticised for doing it. This is a film that reminds us that once upon a time (2011 isn't that long ago) people didn't used to worry or take themselves so damn seriously all the time, and for that reason its an utter joy to watch. 

It's gloriously shot in TECHNICOLOR (as it proudly proclaims in true old school style in it's opening credits) and it oozes bright garish neon colours all over the screen - for a film that's so ugly it has a strange beauty to it as well.

I bought my copy of this film on DVD from my local Pound Land store. It only cost me a quid. It remains to this day the single best pound I've ever spent in my life. 5 Hobo's (with shotguns) out of 5. Glorious mayhem.

ART -