Someone needs to tell all these writers, directors, event organizers and whoever else trying to revive the grindhouse experience that the era of watching Last House on Dead End Street on the Deuce is long gone. If Rodriguez and Tarantino couldn't get audiences to take in their three-and-a-half-hour double-feature love letter Grindhouse a few years back, what the hell makes other filmmakers think they have a shot?
And yet wannabe peddlers of celluloid rotgut still keep trying to make films that resemble the down-and-dirty B-movies they rented in their youths. Hobo With a Shotgun is the latest flick to wear its exploitation-movie influences with vulgar, shameless, disgusting pride, only to find they make a hollow and threadbare suit.
This Canadian flick has Rutger Hauer as a grizzled bum-with-no-name who rides the rails to a crime-infested town run by a psychotic kingpin (Brian Downey). All our homeless hero wants to do is get enough money to buy a lawnmower and start trimming those suburban lawns that are nowhere in sight. After a near-lethal dose of the town's anarchic mayhem, though, he decides a pawn-shop shotgun would make a better investment (with a seemingly unlimited supply of shells, natch).
While all this may sound entertainingly campy, Hobo just comes off desperate. Obviously ripping off — I mean, paying homage to — those batshit-crazy vigilante flicks of the '70s and '80s, down to the synth-cheese anthem over the closing credits, Hobo goes balls deep in giving audiences a depraved, absurdly savage urban Western. It's the sort of flick that doesn't mind having the bad guys hop on a school bus with a flamethrower and a boom box and char all the children inside to the sounds of "Disco Inferno."
But even with despicable showstoppers like that in place, Hobo fancies itself a lowbrow, tongue-in-cheek goof — a profane, purposely putrid piece of pulp fiction tailor-made for audiences who love to act superior to awful exploitation flicks. It's Troma without the sincerity. The first 10 minutes alone are filled with enough gratuitous gore, bad acting, lousy dialogue and WTF storytelling to make you wonder if the rest of the movie will be this schlocky. (The answer: yes.)
Hobo wants so badly to be a midnight-movie cult classic that it overlooks that many movies of that ilk were made unironically. Their unfaked griminess gave them their power, because they were such a downbeat rejoinder to the synthetic sunshine irradiating the mainstream. They weren't made to be sarcastically embraced by a savvy, geeky hipster fanbase, which Hobo aches to grab by whatever Marcona almonds pass for its nuts.
Hobo With a Shotgun's relentless quest to be a gritty grindhouse-worthy flick that still annoyingly, incessantly winks at the audience makes the whole thing a slog to sit through. And this is why the grindhouse revival should die. Overeager filmmakers are so hellbent on making cult films that they have forgotten the golden rule: It takes a cult to make them.
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