Hobo With A Shotgun

I finally got around to watching a DVD of Hobo With a Shotgun (2011) last night (with a 2009 vintage of this). Hobo is a proudly bloody homage to exploitations films of decades past. Despite some high props from friends and colleagues, I’m always hesitant with films that are purely or overtly committed to homage, something I’ve written about before in a thought bubble on nostalgia. That it was spun out of fake trailer contest for Grindhouse did not bode well either.

Rutger Hauer is well-cast as the loner Hobo, in perhaps his finest role since this cinematic gem:

The rest of the cast do fine playing it appropriately hammy with the deliberately limited characterisation of the material and the soundtrack was spot-on. It felt and looked much like a Troma sponge with Jason Eisener’s greater degree of technical proficiency as the persipan.

Perhaps, as most of the Western World slumbers towards economic Depression, the presentation of a dystopic criminal wasteland so prevalent in many films of the 1970′s and 80′s reflecting the economic turbulence of the times (see Robocop as this done to perfection) may take a renewed relevance. *Maybe. This topic is worthy of another post*.

I could mount a case for it being a pointless exercise (it was, largely) but it also felt somewhat genuine and didn’t seem as self-consciously hip/smug/wink-at-audience-how-clever-are-we as others in the canon of writer-directors reliving their childhoods through referential film and meta-humour.