Hobo With A Shotgun

Philosophical question: If you set out to make a rubbish film, and you make a rubbish film, have you succeeded or failed?

To consider this film, you have to look at what it is. Hobo With A Shotgun was one of the trailers submitted by the public in a competition in the run up to Tarantino's Grindhouse project, and won the regional prize for Canada, and was included in the trailer reel for the Canadian release. It's a parody of Troma non-classics such as Surf Nazis Must Die. So this is the important bit; this is a genuine and affectionate attempt to make a schlocky low-budget 80s action-horror movie. Which kind of leads me to wonder if anyone's going to win here.

So. Rutger Hauer (for it is he, and god alone knows how they persuaded him to be involved in this), is a Hobo. He arrives in a new town, and finds it dominated by thugs, crazies, rapists, etc, led by some guy in a white suit calling himself The Drake, who has the manner of a TV Preacher, and whose MO seems to be to keep the entire town in such fear that he can do what he likes.

Anyhow, the Hobo tries to get by as best he can, until finally, he can stands no more, gets himself a shotgun, and goes on a rampage slaying all evildoers before him. The Drake, on the other hand, counters this by setting the whole town on him by putting a bounty of sorts on all homeless people, and it all gets violent and pointless, until the inevitable conclusion. Along the way, the Hobo takes under his wing a hooker who's only doing it because there's no other work, and is a really nice girl really (not that there's anything wrong with being a hooker, but there seems to be a distinction made by the film), and she becomes the sidekick/screaming assistant. But not love interest, thankfully, more like a surrogate daughter.

There's a few other characters of note; The Drake has a pair of sons who could probably get work as John Cusack and Tom Cruise impersonators. But not highly paid work. These two are a couple of baseball jacket and rayban equipped psychos who drive around in an 80's style sports car killing people. There's also a pair of purportedly demonic armoured bikers known collectively as The Plague, which make you think "What, really?" the moment you see them.

Anyway, this whole thing is an excuse for scenes of pointless sadism, and bloody retribution for the above pointless sadism. If it were remotely realistic, you'd be disgusted, as it is, as the gore and dyed corn syrup flies, you just have to laugh.

Ultimately, I suppose the film succeeds in that it manages to make the 90 minutes pass pretty quickly and amusingly; there's a lot of criticisms you could make about the film, but the vast majority of them could be answered with the phrase "that was the whole point". However, as my eye alights on all the films that I own that I've never got round to watching, films of quality and renown, I really feel I should ask myself "Was this really the best use of my time this afternoon?"