Okay, I have to admit I enjoyed Hobo With A Shotgun a lot more than it probably deserves.
Originally a winner in a contest amongst a slew of trailers made for Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse double feature, Hobo With A Shotgun is the second of those trailers to get made into a film after Rodriguez's own Machete.
Filmed in Halifax, Nova Scotia and armed with Rutger Hauer in the lead, this is an extremely violent, profane movie with its film stock and color saturation look firmly in the seventies and its over-the-top colorful punk style ripped from the eighties. Hobo knows it is a cult film, and is aiming straight at that audience, checking off all the boxes for transgressive or weird that it possibly can. But in amongst all the garish intestines and shouted f-bombs, Hauer is STILL pretty damn decent as the titular hobo.
If you do nothing else, seek out the trailer. It is an edited version of a monologue that's in the film, and it pretty much effectively sums up what the viewer is in for. But unlike most of the old grindhouse movies that frequently couldn't deliver on what their trailers promised, Hobo easily comes through. Even though the film is over the top and cartoonish, I can't decide what the most disturbing, horrific scene is. The film is about vigilante justice in a town that is impossibly crime-ridden (though I'm betting places in Mexico at present come pretty close), with the offenses running the full gamut, of murder, torture, etc. right up to torching a school bus full of children.
Lock this one away in the absolutely-not-for-kids box. I'll let my children see this when they are, say, forty.
Now I enjoyed this. But I've got a fucked-up streak a mile wide. Your mileage may vary.
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