By Michael Walsh
He doesn’t want your pennies, nickels and dimes. He wants your blood.
Exploitation film has come a long and twisted way. What was once a genre that had ‘grindhouse’ theaters dedicated solely to the down and dirty film style on street corners across America’s best-known cities has gone wayward. With the oversaturation of disappointing home video quality horror and exploitation that lack the charm of the 1970’s productions, it’s becoming rare to find a film that breathes the same love for the cinema the successes of past year’s did.
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez got it right in their excellent, albeit it overproduced, Grindhouse double feature, a film that spawned two excellent fake trailers turned honest and excellent exploitation film. The first of those was Rodriguez’s own Machete, the second is the recently released Canadian venture Hobo with a Shotgun.
After drifting into Hope Town, Rutger Hauer (Blade Runner), the titular hobo, witnesses the depraved crime and violence the town has to offer its citizens. Backed by a corrupt police force, the sinister Drake (Brian Downey) reigns supreme over the dirty streets of the city along with his sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman) and some kind of unhuman force dubbed ‘The Plague.’ Doing his best Death Wish impression, the unnamed hobo vows to clean the city streets of the scum Drake terrorizes it with and if blood has to be the number one cleansing ingredient, so be it.
No, he isn’t asking for monetary change anymore. Our unlikely hero wants society to change instead. Exploitation films have always been a genre that often was able to speak on messages directed towards society whether intended or not.
Rodriguez’s recent Machete was timely enough to comment on border control issues between America and Mexico and most of the ultra-violent classics, like I Spit on Your Grave, The House on the Edge of the Park and the entire Blaxploitation genre, as depraved, disturbing and sexual as they were, opened discussion, sometimes unintentionally, on race and humanity in general, exploring just what truly despicable acts are possible of those that make up our strange society.
Hobo with a Shotgun does that. It ever so slightly turns the table on its audience. The homeless man and his prostitute friend Abby (Molly Dunsworth) are the most levelheaded and honest characters in the film. Corruption runs rampant through the police force and the town’s citizens are bribed and commissioned by Drake to exterminate all the street’s homeless. Both are unfortunate characters more commonly seen on the other side of things in the history of film, but in director Jason Eisener’s film they’re the odd voice of advocacy for change.
But perhaps more important than the shallow message the film does send, Hobo with a Shotgun fits itself snug inside the genre it belongs in and lays claim to being one of the best in recent years by hitting all the appropriate buttons of the unofficial ‘How to make an exceptional exploitation film’ checklist.
Eisener creates a disgusting, anarchy-filled world of its own and that can only be read as a compliment. Somehow, someway, he turned locations into hopeless, unsightly areas overgrown with depravity. The streets are littered with yesterday’s garbage and the retro looking clubs, arcades and buildings are layered with graffiti. A necessary sense of location inside a depressed world is created, an absolute necessity for any film trying to create circumstances as unlikely as Eisener’s.
But Eisener then does one better by using a stylish and unnatural color tone that helps instill a dreary but oddly appealing visual atmosphere to his film. Opening credits claim the shooting was done with the help of Technicolor, and whether the entire film was actually shot that way or not, it sure appears to be. The oversatured colors help Eisener give his film that unique flair that a great exploitation film needs in order to separate itself from the pack of copycats.
The true plight of modern genre films has been the increased use of CGI effects. Nothing looks as raw and real as handmade special effects, something Hobo with a Shotgun has lots of. Exploitation films know they’re silly, campy and unrealistic, but at the same time a not so strange amount of attention to detail is paid to what is often considered the saving grace of some genre films: the violence.
Relying on the concept of a hobo killing off scum because the scum tortured and killed the hobos and innocent citizens of Hope Town, it’s obvious that Eisener needed to have an absurd amount of death and mutilation happen to its characters. The violence is creative and unique, a must for any film relying so heavily on it, as toasters, hockey skates and lawnmowers are just some of the objects that join the titular shotgun as other weapons featured in the film. The blood is plentiful and the amount of decapitated limbs and heads is up there with the best of them.
Hobo with a Shotgun is a delightfully crude, funny and violent film full of camp and over the top performances from a few actors we’ve seen before. Adding all that to the bright future Eisener clearly has directing this kind of slop and you’ve got one of modern cinema’s best attempts at creating something of the past.
