Hobo with a Shotgun
Ah, the second Grindhouse faux-trailer-turned-full-feature. To put it bluntly, Hobo with a Shotgun is absolutely brutal. I’m not sure that I want to say this in any definitive way, but it may have been the most brutal movie I’ve ever seen…and that’s saying a lot.
Hobo with a Shotgun is exactly what it’s supposed to be, a hobo…with a shotgun. While Rutger Hauer does in fact “deliver justice one shell at a time” just as the tagline says, the brutality comes much less from him and more from the bad guys. I won’t spoil things too much, but one scene actually caused my fiancée to tell me she couldn’t watch it anymore. It was less a blood, guts, and gore thing, and entirely just a principle thing. Hobo with a Shotgun is not for the faint of heart.
Where the movie lacks a little is with the actual hobo-delivered-shotgun-shell-goodness, there could have been more of that as it mostly took up only a small portion of the film. Thankfully, this is made up for with violence like the scene mentioned above. Hobo with a Shotgun is light on the story, but there’s enough to get you by and more than enough great one liners like “I’m going to wash this blood off with your blood” and “because sometimes on the streets, a broom ain’t gonna cut it! That’s when ya gotta get a shotgun!” to make up for it.
Out of the two Grindhouse flicks and Machete, Hobo with a Shotgun is probably at the bottom of the list, but it is the smuttiest, the most sadistically violent, the campiest, the brutalist, and the most nutso. That’s a a lot of superlatives, but these are all of the things that Hobo with a Shutgun was supposed to be and that’s why it works. Highly entertaining.
If this kind of quality can be kept while turning the Grindhouse trailers into actual films, I say keep ‘em coming.
Rating: A
