Rutger Hauer Hitches A Hit ...

Hobo With A Shotgun

(2011/USA)

‘‘Put the knife away kid, or I’ll use it to cut welfare

cheques from your rotten skin’’

Once he was a Hitcher, now he’s a ‘hit and gun’ hobo. Rutger Hauer wipes crime from the street like a bidet blasting bowels !. He may appear a down and out homeless bum, but he’s no asshole. The true rim raiders and scumbags of the streets are the scourge of the state, and this hobo has seen enough. It’s time to take up a shot gun, pump, dump and flush the crap right out of the city !.

Drake (Brian Downey) is the villain of the piece, who along with his two petulant post teen nephews, Slick and Ivan, rule the urban city landscape with dope, prostitution and violence. Life is cheap to them and the people are mere cattle to prod, preen and slaughter as they see fit. Torture is but an entrée to the surf and turf slaughter main dish they relish, with free flowing blood !.

The hobo ambles into the city, having free ridden the livestock carriage of the connecting state train, looking for shelter and to scour about for enough loose change to afford himself the dollars he requires to purchase a sturdy old lawn mower. His focus in his latter years is to start his own lawn cutting business. There’s only one kind of grass that’s cut in this city though, and that’s the kind the Drake supplies !.

Witnessing first hand the excessive force and brutality that Slick and Ivan dish out, all with the approval and encouragement of uncle Drake, the hobo takes a stand when the life of a bright young prostitute is threatened by Slick. The hobo sees good in her and convinces himself that given the chance to escape her lifestyle she could be a teacher. He saves her from the thuggish punk and turns to the cops for help. It is here that the diabolical reality of the city’s situation reveals itself to the well intentioned and decent homeless hobo. Low life criminal scum doesn’t just regulate the streets, it owns the police force that is supposed to protect them !.

Receiving his harsh reality check at the end of a fist, and painfully etched deep into his chest with a blade, both courtesy of Slick, Rutger Hauer’s character takes a stand against the scourge and becomes a … Hobo With A Shotgun !.

The intentional Grind House groove runs rampant in over the top, often excessive violence, splashed across the screen in a crimson cauldron of transgressed trash. The intent is clear, to be as outlandish and over the top as is distastefully possible, highlighted by, the thankfully not shown, but none the less carried out and left to run the gauntlet of gruesomeness across the imagination of those viewing, the sick asphyxiation of a group of school kids on a bus by Slick burning them to death with a flame thrower !. There are certain boundaries that should not be crossed, and even in the blackest vein of shock horror humour this is not a cinematic moment to condone. The only gratification coming out of this unpleasant apparition is the aptly applied last rites of passage to hell epitaph, deftly applied to Slick by the hobo.

The blood, guts and violence otherwise is suitably over the top silliness, and the joy at delighting in Rutger Hauer taking out the trash, shot gun in hand and grizzled dialogue, delivered with vitriolic disdain at those deserving, is nothing short of bad assed inspirational. Hauer owns this role, and effortlessly shows pretty much every other actor up for the minimum wage stooges they portray. Friends, and likely family members of the film makers do not good actors make, even in a low budget production hiding behind its intentions at recreating a genre style where this once upon a time was overlooked. Watching and listening to the character of Slick is akin to experiencing the excellent Jon Cryer recreating his role, today, of Duckie, from Pretty In Pink (1986), but as Tony Montana in Scarface (1983). Please, let’s not have to say hello to this little friend of the film makers again !.

Stand out sequence of the movie without a doubt is when Drake deploys two of the crime worlds most lethal dispensers of pain and death, The Plague. Brothers of botulism, belched forth from the brine and brimstone of Beelzebub’s hellish boudoir. Their onslaught through a hospital in search of the hobo, kitted out as they are in full sheet metal attire, replete with forged eye slit hole helmets and spiked gauntlets, is nothing short of biblical. Like horsemen of the apocalypse, arriving astride their steel steed motorcycles, their passage of pain is surely written somewhere within the text of the book of revelations !.

Gregarious gruel slaps itself across the screen like a visceral Salvador Dali, ladled upon his canvas with a pallet of blood. A nightmarish vision of a world gone to hell, with only the evocation of Charles Bronson, brandishing a shotgun, standing at those gates with both barrels loaded, and pointed directly at Satan’s nut sack !. Major league movie making it ain’t, but balls to the wall grind house experience, it sure as all heck delivers a pretty darned good representation of.

 
 
Movie Rating: 6/10
 
Review by Paul Cooke / Source V.O.D
 
Hobo With A Shotgun (2011)
Director Jason Eisener
With Rutger Hauer, Molly Dunsworth, Gregory Smith,
Nick Bateman, Robb Wells & Brian Downey