Canadian horror-comedy-action movie Hobo With a Shotgun is, indeed, a blast. A gleefully tasteless romp with something to offend just about everyone, at its best it plays like a demented collaboration between John Waters, Dario Argento and John Carpenter. And with each of those maestros either long out of action or long out of form, its arrival on our cinema – screens is a decidedly welcome development.
As a dutiful, full-blooded homage to cheap-and-cheesy 1980s exploitation pictures, it perhaps should ideally be viewed on grainy, warped VHS – but as it’s also a cracking addition to the unashamedly disreputable Midnight Movie sub-genre, it deserves to play (as it’s already done all over the world’s film festival circuit) after dark to appreciative adult audiences willing and able to tune into its gross, sometimes grotesque humour.
Director Eisener and his co-writer John Davies originally devised Hobo With a Shotgun – a classic example of a one-line “pitch” if ever there was one – as a fake trailer, an entry into a competition organised to promote Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s ill-fated Grindhouse double-bill. What started as a one-joke gag – reportedly made on a $200 budget – has been expanded to full feature length and, while there’s perhaps inevitably a certain wayward, ragged unevenness to proceedings, the level of invention and comedy remains at a surprisingly high level from start to finish.
Front and centre pretty much throughout is the eponymous, inevitably nameless Hobo, played with a grizzled, gnarled gravitas by Dutch veteran Rutger Hauer, enjoying an unlikely return to leading man status after a couple of decades in supporting roles. Hauer sensibly plays a pretty straight bat, all the more amusing in contrast to the garish ludicrousness of the plot and mis en scene in which his taciturn character becomes unwittingly enmeshed.
Hopping off a train at semi-random, the 60-something Hobo finds himself in a remote, sleazy, near-lawless settlement officially named Hope Town, – but referred to as Scum Town by most of its beleaguered residents. A kind of anarchic-fascistic “satanic Dystopia”, Scum Town is ruthlessly controlled by a criminal kingpin known only as The Drake (Brian Downey), his sadistic rule enforced by his similarly loathsome and amoral sons Ivan (Nick Bateman) and Slick (Gregory Smith).
Although essentially a loner who’s usually content to mind his own business, the Hobo is spurred to action by witnessing Scum Town’s daily run of cruel depravity – and after (in one of the cornier aspects of a deliberately corny synopsis) befriending kind-hearted sex-worker Abby (Molly Dunsworth). His revolt against The Drake leads to the tin-pot dictator announcing a war on the town’s many homeless people and the escalation of the picture’s body count towards a blood-soaked finale worthy of Jacobean revenge-tragedies.
A savagely satirical political parable wrapped up in a spectacularly violent, pulpy, Western-style story (Stephen King is perhaps another key cultural touchstone), Hobo with a Shotgun is an undeniably cartoonish romp. In the words of their punk rock compatriots NoMeansNo: “Too much is not enough” for Eisener and Davies, who in their first feature barrel us along at a relentlessly fast clip, all the while preventing proceedings from descending into mere kitschy, in-jokey, fan-boy spoofery. Of course, it helps no end that they have a bona fide action star anchoring proceedings in the central role and while it can’t quite match the climax of Blade Runner in terms of poetry, pathos and grandeur, this is certainly Rutger’s finest “hauer” in many a long year
