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66%
Overall Rating
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Ranked #2,461
...out of 20,698 movies
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A vigilante homeless man pulls into a new city and finds himself trapped in urban chaos, a city where crime rules and where the city's crime boss reigns. Seeing an urban landscape filled with armed robbers, corrupt cops, abused prostitutes and even a pedophile Santa, the Hobo goes about bringing justice to the city the best way he knows how - with a 20-gauge shotgun. Mayhem ensues when he tries to make things better for the future generation. Street justice will indeed prevail.
--TMDb
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Review by Chad
Added: April 18, 2011
I had mixed feelings on Hobo with a Shotgun when I heard that it was actually going to be made into a feature-length film. I mean, it was a great two-minute segment and it fit in nicely with the other fake Grindhouse trailers, but stretching it out to ninety minutes? I expected a couple of laughs, a couple of neat scenes, and about sixty minutes of padding. I just didn't think that the idea would work when stretched out, but my word, was I ever wrong. This is the best movie that I have seen all year, and it is easily the best thing to come out of the Grindhouse experience.
The storyline is beautiful in its simplicity, and it follows a hobo (Rutger Hauer) who has just hopped off of a train and into a brand new town. He quickly learns that this town has been taken over by a sadistic overlord in Drake (Brian Downey) and his sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman). The three of them have stricken fear into the hearts of everyone in the town, and they have even taken over the local police force. Basically, in this town, you either turn a blind eye when they decide to decapitate someone with a manhole cover for fun, or you find yourself being decapitated next. Hobo will not stand for this, and with the help of his prostitute best friend Abby (Molly Dunsworth) and eight pounds of shotgun, he sets out to clean the town up once and for all.
See, this is what I feared when I thought about how the movie would play out: it's a neat concept and it sounds great on paper, but how in the hell do you stretch it out to ninety minutes and keep it entertaining? Watching Rutger Hauer go ballistic on street trash is great fun and I'm always down to see some people getting fucked up by the business end of a shotgun, but really, how many times could you repeat those same things and keep it fresh? Thankfully, the filmmakers added in quite a few little surprises to keep the movie flowing nicely (I won't spoil them here), and the result is a movie that never once slows down, gets dull, or feels padded. Everything about the storyline is perfect.
With that said, the main selling point of the film is the camp factor, so if you're looking for a serious horror flick with social commentary about the homelessness problem or about the way that we treat one another, you'll want to pass on this one. If, however, you're looking for a film where it's one man going up against overwhelming odds, peppered liberally with cheesy yet quotable one-liners, and topped off with an insane amount of blood and guts, you've found your movie of the year. The blood flies fast and furious once things kick off, and it never really slows down until the credits roll. It's all done in an almost goofy fashion (think Troma, but with much higher production values), but there was not a single scene that had me thinking "Yeah, I've seen that before." Gorehounds will fall in love with this film, no doubt about it.
Shockingly, the acting is pretty damned good too. Rutger Hauer is absolutely great, which should come as no surprise to anyone who has seen The Hitcher and knows how talented the man is. He is getting up there in years, but he still has it in him and he easily carried the film on his shoulders. Brian Downey is also excellent as Rutger's arch-nemesis, and he brings a lot of life to his diabolical villain role. When you see him start to deliver his monologues, you'll find yourself rooting for Hobo to give him what he has coming to him... and you might also find yourself thinking about how cool it would be to get a movie centered around him and his exploits. Downey's "sons" are perfectly acceptable and so is Molly Dunsworth, but the leads of this film were definitely chosen to fill those roles for a reason.
Hobo with a Shotgun is my movie of the year thus far, and it's going to take one amazing night in front of the tube to change that. This is how grindhouse fare should be, and even though I enjoyed the other three movies that came out of that project, this is the film that exemplifies what the entire thing should have been. It's cheesy at times, it's over the top most of the time, it's bloody as all hell, and most importantly, it's the most fun I've had in front of a television in a long time. 10/10.
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#1:
Mojokc
- added April 21, 2011 at 2:52am
Completely agree with the review here. Lots of
campy fun to be had and a great nod to the
Grindhouse films of old. Some scenes were a little
hard to watch (IE: The bus scene) which made you
really loathe the villains even more. Nothing felt
out of place or just shoved into the mix for
padding. On a side note I wouldn't mind having a
razor baseball bat myself. Overall great movie
10/10 here as well.
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#2:
C L
- added May 7, 2011 at 8:17pm
I totally agree with the review. Fun movie.
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#3:
Donovan
- added June 29, 2011 at 8:34pm
I'd go with at least a 9 on this one.... it was
just over the top in every way possible, and
seemed to get better the further into the movie it
went. Loved it!
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