Lisa

How big a movie geek am I? Well, here’s a hint. More years ago than I care to admit, I flew to Jackson, Mississippi to visit an actor I was dating at the time who was starring in a horror movie shooting there. One night we headed over to the local movieplex, where we were the only two people for the evening show of a re-release of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. After the movie, the theatre manager recognized my boyfriend and invited us up into the theatre attic—which was stuffed with 30 years of movie memorabilia. He told us we could take whatever we wanted. Well, this theatre had apparently never shown a first-run film, and that was fine with me. I walked out with a stack of stuff that included a Battle Beyond the Stars poster, Rock and Roll High School lobby cards, and Death Race 2000 stills.

Yeah, I’m a pretty big movie geek.

So I totally dug Hobo with a Shotgun.

I have no idea if someone who wasn’t intimately acquainted with 1970s and ’80s exploitation cinema would get this movie or not, but the geeks like me are in for a whopping good wallow. Hobo with a Shotgun takes a lot of the basic themes and aesthetics of the true grindhouse cinema, and ramps everything up a little. The colours are brighter, the gore is more insane, the music is louder, the plot is dumber, and stuck in the middle of all of it is an honest-to-God movie star, delivering a performance entirely too good for a movie this gleefully dumb. It may have been more than a quarter of a century since Rutger Hauer became a star for playing Roy Batty in Blade Runner, and sure, Rutger’s aged a little . . . but his talent and charisma certainly haven’t. He’s still magnificent.

Did I mention “gleefully dumb”? Well, here’s the plot: a hobo rides a freight train into former “Hope Town,” now named either “Scum Town” or “Fuck Town” because of the gang of criminals that’s taken over. Led by Drake (Brian Downey, looking strangely like Robert Blake in Lost Highway), this gang is so bad that, when we first meet Drake, he’s killing his own brother. After Drake’s manic kid Slick (Gregory Smith) threatens a cute hooker named Abby (Molly Dunsworth), the hobo grabs a shotgun from a pawnshop and gets busy. Drake eventually calls in two armoured thugs known as “The Plague” (these guys are so badass that they even drag along their own coffin) to stop the hobo.

That’s it. There’s no extraneous subplot, no back story, no bullshit—just one hour and 27 minutes of over-the-top ultraviolence, punctuated with stellar acting from Hauer. Director Jason Eisener certainly gets a lot of the ’70s stuff right—the use of zooms, the saturated colors, the snappy (and sometimes deliberately not-so-snappy) dialogue, the thudding synth score, pay phones and VHS tapes . . . it’s all there. And Eisener’s done it without relying on using real period character actors; because he actually gets what exploitation movies are about, he doesn’t need to resort to the Rob Zombie/Robert Rodriguez tactic of replicating the period by padding his movie with actors who mainly worked then (not that I ever object, mind you, to seeing Ken Foree or Richard Lynch or Nancy Allen). Eisener occasionally fumbles the pace a little, stopping for long scenes between the hobo and Abby (as they plan a life together outside Scum Town) . . . but the real grindhouse movies were padded, too. Remember all the time Pam Grier spent next to hospital beds in Foxy Brown or Coffy? (Probably not. You’d rather remember Pam blasting white mofos while cursing ’em out. Me too.)

Eisener and his writer John Davies also don’t forget another lesson from the grindhouse glory days that not a lot of their contemporaries have learned. These movies often had . . . well, if not exactly a well-honed social conscience, at least a sense of outrage at some part of the world around them. They didn’t simply show girls fighting zombies, or crazy stunt drivers terrifying passengers; they were often rooted in real urban situations and settings. In Faster Pussycat, Kill, Kill (and yes, I know it’s from the ’60s, but to me it’s one of the classic exploitation films), Russ Meyer suggested that women demeaned by working as strippers could turn violent. The blaxploitation films, of course, took it all to the streets, with heroes and heroines typically fighting drug lords and their flunkies. For all of its loony characters (Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe Viterbo), Death Race 2000 was set in a fascist regime. And Hobo takes that social agenda and puts it front and centre for the 21st century, using our slide into the economic abyss to provide its conscience by making the homeless into the heroes.

Hobo stumbles a few other times. For one thing, it features more violence against children than any film I may have ever seen—at one point a bad guy literally incinerates an entire busload of kids. My objection to that is simply that you would never have found masses of children being slaughtered in something from the 1970s (although one could argue that by the Nightmare on Elm Street series of the 1980s, it was certainly more common). I doubt that Eisener was consciously trying to make some comment about changing attitudes toward children; more likely, he was simply looking for the biggest shock possible.

Hobo has its share of good “Oh my God, did you see THAT?” shocks, too. People are shotgunned, carved, hammered, mashed, hung, thrust into whirling lawnmower blades, beheaded, disembowelled, and hung upside-down and beaten as human piñatas . . . by a trio of giggling topless girls, yet. It doesn’t get much grindier than that.

If you’re a movie geek like me—who has a drawer stuffed with stills from movies directed by Allan Arkush and Jack Hill—I can pretty much guarantee you’ll have a fine time with Hobo with a Shotgun. You’ll probably still enjoy it even if you’re a grindhouse novice. I’d say only those with a low tolerance for oodles of sticky gore need not apply.

Mike

Fuck civilization.

I mean it.

Fuck it.

I don’t mean that in a Robert E. Howard kinda “Barbarism-is-the-Only-Truth-Conan-hack-and-slay” kinda way. I mean that civilization is only interesting when it questions its own value. When it challenges itself. The bitter old punk rocker in me says that maybe civilization is a masochist, only it doesn’t know it. It’s happiest when it’s being slapped around a little.

Indulge me while I rant off in hyperbole, because there is no way to address the hyperbolic magnificence of Hobo with a Shotgun without hyperbole. But . . . look at the various lists of the greatest novels of the recently departed 20th century. Great novels, meaning works that have perpetuated and continue to perpetuate civilization, kinda kick the shit out of civilization. Here’s the first ten titles off of Modern Library’s list of the top 100 novels of the 20th century: Ulysses, by James Joyce; The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce; Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov; Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley; The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner; CATCH-22, by Joseph Heller; Darkness at Noon, by Arthur Koestler; Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence and The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck.

And for shits and giggles, let’s look at the top ten novels of the 20th Century as tabulated by the Radcliffe Publishing Course (now no longer at Radcliffe, but Columbia University). By skipping some repeats with the Modern Library list, we get a packet of six additional titles: The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger; To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee; The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, Beloved, by Toni Morrison; The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding and 1984, by George Orwell.

You could argue that all these books challenge, bludgeon, coco-butt, pile-drive civilization. And thereby make it stronger. And thereby enrich it and affirm it. Is there a single comedy among those books? A single conventional love story? A single book that reaffirms the Protestant work ethic and the nuclear family? Is there one Horatio Alger tale of pluck and luck taking a kid to the very top of an Ayn Rand Objectivist jerk-off utopia? If you were to click onto Amazon today and order all sixteen of these books, an algorithm cooked by some screen-squinting, Bezos-bitched keyboard jock would start suggesting that maybe you should start Listening to Prozac. Because these books are full of (sing it with me) Madness and Chaos and Angst, Oh, My!

Try to create a reading group in a suburban, gated community centred around these sixteen books, and you’ll be tarred, tasered and feathered and run out on a rail.

We limit civilization by not challenging it. To limit civilization is to impede it. Impeding civilization is by definition, a kind of barbarism. It’s a new barbarism that kills civilization not by god old-fashioned pillaging, but by smothering it with lack of exercise.

Hobo with a Shotgun celebrates and enhances civilization by giving it a fuck of a workout. It’s enlightened barbarism, glorious in its brutal affirmations. Yes, it’s most certainly a throwback to 1970s grindhouse cinema. The origins of the flick lie with director Jason Eisener’s fake trailer submitted for inclusion in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s orgasm-inducing 2007 Carter-era throwback double feature Grindhouse. As an anti-social, molar-cracking assault on human decency about a hobo dispensing double-barrelled justice starring the great Rutger Hauer, Hobo with a Shotgun not only revisits the 1970s with its civilization-affirming barbarism, it also retroactively redeems a lot of 1980s exploitation cinema.

As a 1970s throwback, Hobo with a Shotgun is a celebration of the anti-hero. Who is more of an anti-hero than a grizzled old fuck like Hauer sleeping in dumpsters blowing away corrupt cops, rapists, and child molesters? As Marty Scorsese, filmic father of Travis Bickle, said a while ago that “The end of the ’70s was the last golden period of cinema in America. . . . [A]nd the next thing you knew, E.T. made so much money, and it only cost $10 million.” With the arrival of 1980s “Morning in America” cinema, glowing-fingered kitsch superseded the anti-hero, and it’s typically the anti-hero who can bitchslap civilization and keep it happy and healthy. In the 2000 documentary Making “Taxi Driver”, Marty’s star Jodie Foster said, “The ’70s in filmmaking, as well as in literature, was a different time from any other time, and I think the Golden Age for cinema. For me, the best movies that I know of were [made in] in the ’70s, precisely because I think people were really concerned [with], or interested by, the anti-hero . . . which has pretty much gone away, now. I don’t think audiences really want to accept the anti-hero any more.”

With the advent of 1980s cinema, and the fading of the anti-hero, even our exploitation movies got fitted with Neuticles. Movies with great titles like Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama and Attack of the Killer Bimbos gave you only a Jim Henson-y pantomime of decadence. The civilization-affirming anti-social, anti-hero capacity of those 1980s exploitation flicks felt phony. Just a going-through-the-motions of exploitation.

Hobo with a Shotgun, with its 1970s anti-hero aesthetic, is a long-overdue, Peter North-y release of 1980s exploitation blueballs. It feels like a 1970s flick, but it looks like a 1980s flick, and has a lot of the meanness that saturated the 1980s junk culture of entitlement. Two of the villains, Ivan and Slick, look like idiot clones of Tom Cruise of the Risky Business era . . . and have pretty much the same attitude. This movie out-Tromas Troma, with its garish colours that look like the retinal afterimage of an 8-bit Sega video game marathon and angles that’d be right at home on a video you’d see on MTV’s 120 Minutes when Dukakis was a viable candidate.

What’s more, at this point, Hobo with a Shotgun proves we’re in the midst of a beautiful new cultural trend. Between Hobo, Predators, Stallone’s The Expendables and Piranha 3D, we’re doing 1980s exploitation better now than it was done in the 1980s. These movies fulfill all the promises that were made to us amidst the New Release aisles of Blockbuster Videos in the strip malls of Reagan’s America.

Hobo with a Shotgun is a hog-wallow in the Id of Western Civilization. This movie is nasty, brutish and cheap . . . and it will make you feel the same after you see it—in a good way.

Hobo with a Shotgun is, ultimately, good for civilization.

So long as it doesn’t forget its safe word.