Hobo with a Shotgun – review

Here's one I maimed earlier: Rutger Hauer in the bloody horror Hobo with a Shotgun.Hobo With A ShotgunProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 18Runtime: 86 minsDirectors: Jason EisenerCast: Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth, Nick Bateman, Rutger HauerMore on this film

Clips from non-existent films have been a regular cinematic feature for years, but I'm not sure when the first fake trailer appeared. There were several in John Landis's sketch comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), including a beauty for the enticing "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble", and a couple the following year in the interval of the spoof 1930s double bill that constitutes Stanley Donen's seriously neglected Movie Movie. A couple of years ago Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez included a number in Grindhouse, their double bill of parodic exploitation films that never reached this country in its original form. The Canadian release of Grindhouse, however, was apparently accompanied by a joke trailer for a cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick with the in-your-face title Hobo with a Shotgun. This has now become an authentic cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick. Shot in deliberately garish colour, it stars Rutger Hauer as a grizzled tramp who arrives by rail in a hellish American community and takes on an outrageous gang of murderous local bullies. It should have remained a trailer. Most Hauer movies go straight to those bins that were once a feature of video stores. This one belongs at the bottom of a disused coal mine in one of those desperately impoverished West Virginia townships that advertise for people to send them their nuclear waste.

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Hobo With a Shotgun – review

Flashes of demented brilliance ... Rutger Hauer.Hobo With A ShotgunProduction year: 2011Country: Rest of the worldCert (UK): 18Runtime: 86 minsDirectors: Jason EisenerCast: Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Molly Dunsworth, Nick Bateman, Rutger HauerMore on this film

There are some for whom the buzz and grind of the hand forced into the mower's rotor blades, the scream of pain, the shotgun blast, the splat of brains hitting the wall and the yelp of vengeful triumph are all sweet, sweet music. I'm not among them, though I've got to admit there are flashes of demented brilliance in this hardcore crassploitation splatter pic. It is unrelentingly concerned at all times to be as offensive as possible and gives Rodriguez's Machete and Tarantino's Death Proof a serious run for their money. Perhaps only Rutger Hauer could have brought the correct nuance to the role of a righteous hobo who shows up in some lawless, post-apocalyptic urban hellhole in Canada, to find the loathsome roost ruled by the sadistic Drake family – a raddled old tyrant with dyed black hair and two psycho-bully sons who dress like rejects from an 80s pop video. A prostitute with a heart of gold and a surprisingly nice flat takes granddaughterly pity on the hobo and gives him a chaste bed for the night – so when the bad guys get violent with her, the hobo gets a shotgun and metes out vengeance, making Insp Harry Callahan look like Relatively Clean Harry.

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