Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Jason watches HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

I had a day off from Holehead, but I kept the genre flowing with this one. And it's pretty freakin' awesome! Rutger Hauer (who deserves a Mickey Rourke style resurgence in popularity) stars as the titular Hobo. He's never given a name, but he arrives riding the rails to a scum-filled city ruled by ruthless psychopath The Drake. He sees some mindless violence, but tries to keep his head low. But he just can't help himself when The Drake's son abuses a young lady (okay, a prostitute, but she still deserves to live). He gets cut up, but finally the abuse gets too much and he goes all vigilante with a shotgun.

It's got that great 70's grindhouse feel, with insane, cartoonish villains, the scratchy film look, even the classic Technicolor logo and the yellow text title and credits. It's apparently based on a fake trailer made for a SXSW grindhouse trailer competion and attached to the Canadian release of Tarantino/Rodriguez's GRINDHOUSE. It's the movie GRINDHOUSE wishes it was (and I say that as a big fan of GRINDHOUSE). With this and MACHETE, it appears that GRINDHOUSE might be even better as an inspiration for a revival of genre homage movies than it was as a movie in it's own right.

Running Time: 86 minutes
My Total Minutes: 238,341

1 comment:

baceman007 said...

I finally watched this movie a few weeks ago, and then I watched it again with a few other people. I won't waste time agreeing with you. Instead I'll say that I really appreciated the level of detail in general. For example, the classic 80's D-Bag cars like the Delorian and the arcade machines that you could do coke off of and they would keep working because old arcade machines are pretty tough. Also, the character "Hobo" reminded me of Clint Eastwood in some of his more avenging roles, like in Unforgiven, especially when he wrapped up why he had to do what he was doing with "It's all I know." I had tons of respect for Abby, prostitute or no at least she was out working. Also, I thought the lawnmower scene (spoiler by the way) at the end was a lot like that in The Evil Dead.