Hobo With a Shotgun (2011)

"If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes..."

Despite a complete lack of depth, Jason Eisener's neo-grindhouse Hobo still gets the job done. Like a creaky roller coaster, it takes you for one hell of a relentless ride into the abysmal depths of society, caricatured with (very) broad strokes of a bloody brush on a decrepit urban canvas. Genre icon Rutger Hauer therein manages to combine the murderous anger of replicant Roy Batty, the tenderheartedness of Blind Fury's Nick Parker and the derelict look of The Hitcher in one engrossing character with iconic potential: a poor man's Batman whose visceral sense of justice is unmarred by aristocratic word-chewing and flashy gadgets. Well-supported by a cast of ultra-nasty villains and heroic hookers, he breezes through the narrative with his hand on the pump and the viscera of his adversaries all over his dirty clothes. That said, the title alone should give you a fairly accurate description of what to expect from the film, not in its literal connotation alone, but in its simplistic, straightforward and politically incorrect wording.

Hobo wishes to start anew. But he needs

to do a little cleaning first...

Face value

Frankly, while the film is highly entertaining, a delight for undiscriminating fans of gory violence, it doesn't have any further ambition. When I first read the synopsis, I immediately thought about Street Trash. And so I braced myself for an unapologetic milieu study that used black humor to highlight the desperate joie de vivre necessary to endure life in the gutter. But that was without taking into account the film's gorgeous cinematography, its surprising sense of social realism and tendency toward self-deprecation, which are nowhere to be found in Hobo.

Eisener's film is a lovingly crafted homage to both the exploitation cinema of the 1970s and the gore cinema of the 1980s. But beyond this crude, yet successful crossover of genres, it has little to offer in terms of artistic or intellectual depth. It is purely focused on fan service, which makes it refreshingly unpretentious, but also wholly limited. Everything on the screen has great face value, but from the moment you scratch the surface and try to find deeper meaning, you will be met with the coldness of interstellar void.

Although it shares Troma's knack for crafting overly nasty, intellectually inane villains, Hobo lacks the lighthearted, parodic tone that helps propel Kaufman's films near the realm of social satire. What's left are unidimensional, hardly memorable archetypes whose raison d'être is entirely limited to titillating our bloodlust and providing meaty obstacles on the protagonist's course. There are no hilarious stabs at municipal politics or juvenile nihilism in here, just an endless strand of clay pigeons succeeding each other under a rain of buckshot.

Using a gritty, grainy style of photography to circumvent the atrocities, the film uses disgusting violence in order to justify disgusting retaliation in a never-ending loop of immediate, simplistic causality. Thus, the only fun to derive from the film lies with one's own twisted sense of justice and enthusiasm for ruthless gore. But then again, the target audience has both of these qualities in spades.

Blowing up balls for justice

Street cleaning in a nutshell

Thankfully, the film is so fast-paced and full of nasty splatter that it hardly gives you time to breathe and reflect on the flimsiness of the narrative. It starts with an unnamed hobo on a train, crossing the border into Hopetown, which the locals have dubbed Scumtown, a much more adequate denomination for this urban hellhole. One of the first events witnessed by Hauer's character is a brutal street execution carried out by local crime kingpin "The Drake" and his two dim-witted sons Slick and Ivan. Their victim, Drake's brother, is stuck through a manhole with a cast-iron cover fastened around his head, then beheaded in front of a large crowd forced to cheer at gunpoint. After that, a scantily clad she-bum rushes in and starts dancing lasciviously over the geyser of blood.

After witnessing a number of such tasteless incidents, culminating in a particularly mean-spirited robbery in which a toddler is menaced at gunpoint, the protagonist abandons his dream of purchasing a lawnmower to start a landscaping business and buys a shotgun instead, with which he wreaks havocs on the many different types of criminals plaguing Hopetown, following the trail of bodies right up to The Drake. In the process, he befriends a warm-hearted prostitute who gets stuck in the crossfire when she attempts to help him exact justice. There are no subplots here, just a mean, literal and linear chronicle of the titular character's exploits, highlighted by frequently creative gore and some tame attempts at humor articulated around crude word plays and a cameo by popular Canadian show host George Stroumboulopoulos who hams it up as a newscaster brutally murdered on the air. As for any attempts at legitimate social critique, they are marred by an overly cartoony depiction of violence and a total lack of nuance in the characterization.

Beheading in 3-2-1...

Canadian genre fans unite!

Just with the description above, you should know instantly whether or not this film is your cup of tea. Even a mildly positive reaction should warrant a ticket for the ride, for there is no let-down following the initial street execution. There is actually an incremental progression in the brutality of the violence, which is sure to please even the most demanding of gorehounds. That said, I urge all Canadian genre fans to crowd the few theaters in which the film is shown nationwide. At the dawn of these umpteenth general elections, it will give you a rare chance to appreciate federal money well spent.

The reviewer for this week's Montreal Mirror opened his article with a statement to the effect that Hobo represents the most controversial use of Telefilm's money since David Cronenberg's Shivers in the late 70s. While a far cry from David's first commercial feature film, a venereal zombie film and a strong link in his unbroken chain of body horror films, Hobo delivers what every genre fans relishes: rhythm, gore and a total lack of morality. And it delivers all these things in stacks. Thus, you get blown-off heads, beheadings, broken limbs, hung orderlies, carbonized children, splattered hobos, hands stuck in lawnmowers, shotgun wounds to the stomach, bone shard impalements, neck-sawing, skate blade kicks, fuming electrocutions, cop killings, chest carving, genital explosions, all comprised in the short, 86-minutes runtime. Suffice it to say that this film is j-u-i-c-y, and it is quite unapologetic about it. Its Manichean outlook on justice and personal politics in the face of criminality actually help it stuff brutality with brutality, creating a turducken of gore, which becomes the perfect vehicle for the crafty special effects team at work here.

Getting your money's worth

From the moment you approach the box office and say: "One ticket for Hobo with a Shotgun", you should know where your money is going. Or at least, you should have a pretty fair idea of what to expect. That said, nobody who willingly decides to cross the threshold into the theater should be disappointed with the film. For Canadians, it's also a rare chance to see their tax money at work. And while not every taxpayer will agree with the filmmakers' usage of immoral ultra-violence, nobody can deny that they did a great job of giving the fans exactly what they want, which is what popular cinema is all about. Thus, while it is a social investment in monetary terms, Hobo gives us an instant return onscreen, in a vernacular language shared by all, rich and poor, Francophone and Anglophone, men and women. Truly, it is one of the very, very few good things to come out of Harper the First's Conservative government. But now, come May 2nd, it will be time for a new era of medieval obscurantism to begin. After that, our home horror films won't be on the screens anymore, but in the streets, where cops with stun batons will beat and jail 100-pounds hippies armed with cardboard signs in a tyrannical display of power that perfectly exemplifies the state of North-American democracy as a form of representative repression. Still, when corrupt heads of state start ruining your lives, you can always turn to the horizon and maybe, just maybe, a hobo with a shotgun will be there!

3/5: A relentless gorefest that gives you no time to reflect on its shallowness.

Footnote 02/14: Added half a star. Karim Hussain's over-saturated photography is just that good, and a nice way to create that vintage 70s look!