ActionFest '11: HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN Review

Hobo with a Shotgun feels like a lost and ultraviolent product of the Canadian Tax Shelter films , the cycle of delightfully demented horror films from the 1970s and 1980s that resulted from an excess of government cash put in to stimulate a flailing Canadian movie industry.  In fact, the film is indeed set somewhere in the early 1980s judging by the look of the currency being occasionally tossed around as well as a boxy gull wing car and a few choice boom boxes.  While the film may have started its life as faux trailer entry in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse, its graduation to a full-length feature easily eclipses Rodriguez's own trailer-turned-movie, Machete.  It draws its DNA not from the naughty drive-in and inner-city trash-palace fair of the 60s and 70s, but the ultraviolence of George Miller's Mad Max films as well as the splatstick of Peter Jackson's Dead Alive and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead cycle, although if your ears are peeled at the beginning of the film you might just hear echoes of the Cannibal Holocaust theme.   

But Eisener has two tricks up his sleeve that prevents Hobo With A Shotgun from being just another entry in the increasingly boring splatter comedy subgenre.  The first is the iconic genre stalwart Rutger Hauer (the ideal nexus-6 himself, Roy Batty) an actor known first from porno-violent Dutch cinema of Paul Verhoeven, to leading man psychos and avenging angels in the 1980s, to the direct to video cheese of the 1990s and early 2000s.  Age-lines and white facial hair and Hauer's particular brand of intensity all serve him up as the perfect straight-man in the Grand Guignol atmosphere of Scumtown.  Occasionally he has to snarl out a one-liner (sans original Hobo David Brunt's Maritime accent) but the real strength is conviction with Abbey and an tired exasperation with the rest of the world.  The second ace-in-the-hole is Eisener's unique way of directing the rest of his actors.  Call it "Shout Acting" which was certainly present in the original Hobo trailer, "WE'RE ALL DIRTY COPS!" and his christmas themed horror short, Treevenge ("I SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN SCHOOL..." is shout-mumbled from one of the gruff loggers as he struggles with dragging a chopped christmas tree out of the forest.)  One of the chief delights in Hobo is the wacky comments the characters shout at each other in between acts of bloody cartoon violence.  They are crude and rude, but hilariously creative.  Mention should go to Karim Hussain's colorfully inventive cinematography which echoes the riot-like tones of by mixing the yellow-purple-blue lighting of old Dario Argento films with a decidedly modern digital grain.