Hobo with a Shotgun

This is an astoundingly demented and brilliant film - it's in the tradition of exploitation cinema and indeed is a based on a winning trailer of the same name from Robert Rodriguez's South by Southwest Grindhouse trailers contest. The film has stoked up the ire of Britain's Daily Mail newspaper and as we all know anything that angers the  morons at the Mail is usually good. And this is good - better than good. OK it's extremely violent but it's cartoon violence and each and every time a character is decapitated or blown apart the body gushes gallons upon gallons of the red stuff.

Under the heading, Run This Hobo out of Town, The Daily Mail wrote - This noisy, bloody, aggressively decadent exploitation flick,  in which a homeless alcoholic ‘cleans up’ a preposterously corrupt American town — is based on a fake trailer attached to Grindhouse, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s 2007 celebration of all things brutal and sleazy.Its idea of fun is to show a girl having all her fingers chopped off by a lawnmower or a man having his head ripped off by a gangster while a hot babe in a bikini dances orgiastically in the ensuing fountain of blood.

But we ignore The Daily Mail and besides the Hobo of the movie isn't an alcoholic and the Mail are, as always, missing the point. The plot is of the seen it all before variety, but then that's the point with exploitation movies. It's supposed to be like that, you see and any movie starring the great Rutger Hauer is always worth watching.

"You can't solve all your problems with  shotgun."

"I've got to try."

It's hardcore splatter that tries to be as offensive as possible and to my mind is far better than Machete which was the other movie that sprung up from the fake trailers attached to the Grindhouse movies. The Hobo's highest aspiration is  the acquisition of a lawnmower in this convincingly excessive homage to cheap 1970s movies,



"Put the knife away or I'll use it to carve welfare cheques on your skin!"

I loved this movie - it looks like it was filmed in the 1970's, is acted and written in that style and never fails to entertain. There ain't nothing wrong with this movie which really isn't meant to be taken seriously and it does provide a brilliant ride. You'll be laughing one moment and wincing the next, on times your stomach will even churn. The climax is truly jaw dropping.

The violence is indeed extreme - people get blown away, splattered, cut up, burned up, arms and legs get broken, but it's all done in an absurd fashion. None of it is meant to be taken seriously and  there are flashes of demented brilliance in this hardcore crassploitation splatter pic.

You know what....I'm gonna's give the disc a second spin.