Hobo With A Shotgun
 

I rented this movie from On Demand (for some reason it was put there before it was released in theatres) and I would like to give anyone who wants to see it a warning.

This movie is depraved. I was only able to get halfway through before I had to stop. They cross the line way too many times, with the language and the gore. For example, a school bus full of children is burned ON SCREEN. I beg you, please don't watch this movie

Damn that bad? You watch the whole amputation scene in that hiking movie and then cant get halfway through this? It wasnt something i was planning to run out and see but damn i never thought that bad.

I didn't see that movie

The dialogue in Hobo With a Shotgun is just plain bad. One guy literally says something along the line of "Are you wet? Because you are making my dick thirsty" and some other things I wish I wouldn't have heard

Sorry got it mixed up who had seen that from another thread, was there even any humor or did they go solely for shock value?

They were dead serious

Damn, i actually enjoyed machete, thought this may be the same style.

Nope. You could tell Machete didn't take itself that seriously

Seriously? There wasn't a serious scene in that movie. It starts with a cameo by Ricky from Trailer Park Boys, for god's sakes. The humor might be a little more subtle, but it's exactly the same kind as Machete. I mean, yes the movie is mean-spirited, the violence is way over the top and the dialogue is intentionally cheezy, but that's what makes it an exploitation movie. It's about a borderline mentally ill homeless person fighting crime with a used shotgun, what do you expect?

Ive seen a lot of negatie reviews popping up. One reviewer said you want to puke and take a shower after seeing it.

Well I wasn't going to see it but now I really want to.

I wonder why they picked THIS fake trailer to make a full movie out of. It wasn't even included in the version of Grindhouse I saw in the theater. Of all the fake trailers, Machete was the obvious favorite to be made into a feature, but come on, Werewolf Women of the SS must've been (an albeit, distant) second.

Im with burt on this one...i didnt want to see it until i heard the complaints on this thread.

I caught this on HDNet Movies tonight. I'm not really surprised by how terrible it was, I'm just surprised that RUTGER FRICKIN' HAUER would agree to be in it. Wasn't he in Batman Begins just a few years ago? I'd call it a B movie, but that's an insult to B movies. Machete has Danny Trejo, De Niro, Jessica Alba and Jeff Fahey, this movie has Rutger Hauer and... that guy from Trailer Park Boys. It felt like a student film. A student film starring Rutger Hauer.

I respect your opinion and your moral reserves, but I'm not sure what you expected. If you've seen any of the films within the genre they were aiming for, especially those within the era they were attempting the emulate, "crossing the line" was done to bring audiences into theater seats, whether for the right reasons or not. The Dirty Harry films, the Death Wish series, The Exterminator, the first two Road Warrior films, Warriors, even spaghetti Westerns and Peckinpah films, vigilantes in exploitation films have a long and incredibly violent history, and the filmmaker had a considerable amount of source material to work with. If "depravity" and violence bother you, these films are not for you. Not to be rude, I mean this politely, but if language still has the power to offend you in a film, then a film like this was certainly not intended for you. It's film, and film emulates real life, not the other way around. I can assure you, more violent, graphic, and unacceptable things have happened in real life, and your outrage should be directed there. You should be willing to let anyone interested in this film decide for themselves whether the content is too much for them rather than telling them not to see it themselves. I suspect that most anyone with interest in this film is not in the same boat, no disrespect intended, as you.

There is a difference between Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, or John Wayne shooting mooks and a guy getting cut open in high detail with a baseball bat covered in razor blades or someone burning a schoolbus full of children with a flamethrower

The other Grindhouse trailers were written and directed by well-known directors on very high budgets (the Thanksgiving trailer, for example, was a $900,000 project, which is considerably higher than many feature length independent films). Those directors, in many cases, have the means to produce those films if interest is shown, Rodriguez being the most likely of them due to his long list of successful films and well-known ability to produce a highly-regarded film on a relatively small budget. Some of the trailers didn't attempt to piece together enough of a narrative to be constructed into a feature length without the film being flat (the Don't trailer, for example, was based on a number of trailers that made the film seems fantastical and created a narrative that wasn't true to the film in order to garner interest based on shock and violence, Suspiria comes to mind, as well as The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue). Others were clearly imitating other films (Thanksgiving, Halloween and Friday the 13th, Werewolf Women of the SS, Ilsa, and the historical Werwolf plan).

Hobo With A Shotgun, however, was selected out of a number of similar fake trailers in a contest to be shown on the DVD and in Canadian theaters. The film was created in Canada, where production costs are much lower, using mostly unknown talent and independent, young crew. The assumption is that it went over well in Canadian theaters, the producers approached them about turning it into a feature as the narrative was simple and costs would be low in the director's (and audience's) native Canada, and, as the exploitation film formula dictates, bringing on a single, older name actor to play the title character. The differences between the actual production of this film and Machete, despite genre similarities, are night and day.

Machete is not a B movie. To say that Machete is a B movie and then follow it with a laundry list of A-list actors just demonstrates that someone has been fooled. Hobo With A Shotgun was a relatively low-budget film, using a single name actor and a few quick, cheap cameos. It thrived on shock value and violence and takes itself as seriously as any exploitation movie during the hayday of the genre did. Machete is a farce, taking high production values, high budget production costs, high-end acting talent, and dressing it up as a low-brow, low-rent B movie. The reason Machete takes itself less seriously is because it is not what it pretends to be, and everyone involved knows that.

Clint Eastwood RESPONDED to a man kidnapping a bus full of children, who he intended to kill, by shooting the man in cold blood.

Charles Bronson RESPONDED to every single act of violence and rape on an innocent person by killing those responsible.

Eastwood and Freeman RESPONDED to a prostitute getting her face cut to shreds by a rustler by killing them and any who defended them outright.

Wayne RESPONDED to a young girl's father being killed by hunting down the man responsible and ending him and his cohorts. Mind you, no one said Wayne made exploitation films, he occasionally made B movies, but for his time, he was and A-list actor. He doesn't belong in this discussion.

An act of unmitigated violence has to happen before a vigilante is able to respond to the crime on the streets with force. It's the definition of the genre. If a vigilante acts before the criminal does, he's a part of the problem and not the unlawful solution.

Please remember, this is a MOVIE. Millions of innocent people have been murdered, torture, unrightfully punished throughout the history of mankind, hell, even since the advent of cinema, and that's where your outrage belongs. Getting miffed about an actor pretending to harm another actor, with food coloring and corn syrup on their clothes, rubber weapons in their hands, and a very shiny check in their pockets, is just pointless. There are so much better places to put your outrage and consideration.

I wanted to add to my previous comments, as a few friends and I drove up to New York last night to see the film, as well as a Q&A session with the director and other crew.

First of all, for a genre film, and for anyone going into the theater knowing what they're going to see and who enjoys this sort of exploitation piece, the film was fantastic. It was creative, it was interesting, it was engaging, and yes, it was crass, but I was never offended to a degree that upset me. The film was gory, violent, and abrasive, and I can list you 20 other films that it was clearly inspired by that are, for their time, just as grating and harsh. Mind you, the films it emulates were created 20, 30, or more years ago. Many of them played out fairly slow, and had a few very graphic, violent scenes with which they are remembered for. A modern audience, even one who loves those films, won't accept that. We need more, we need it faster, and we need it more consistently. It's to be expected, and if you went in to the theater expecting something else after seeing the trailer, reading any press what so ever about it, or even just seeing the poster and reading the title, I question your ability to rationalize your own choices.

Yes, the language was tough. I am always surprised, in this day and age, with the sort of media that is available and the degree that major blockbuster films and television after 10pm takes language to, when anyone is offended by language anymore. This is nothing worse than any episode of South Park, which can be seen on basic cable. Yes, there were extreme acts of violence, some of which were incredibly disturbing... had they been real. The majority of the visual effects were just so over the top that, if you were disturbed on a real level, I have to wonder what you think real violence and viscera looks like. While the acts were violent, many of the effects that depicted them on screen were simply blood. It's a film expressly written about a lead character with a shotgun, the most common effects are blood and gore blasting out of a protagonist in the most cartoonish way possible. The realism involved is on the same level as when a character uses cocaine, smashing their face violently into a comically oversized pile of white power and wiggling their face back and forth. Other violent acts aren't even shown in graphic detail. The previously mentioned bus burning is almost entirely suggested; you see the attackers with flamethrowers get on the bus, you see the reverse shot of the children, the attackers talk to the children, the attackers use the flamethrowers in the direction of the camera. A single child is seem pressing against the back window trying to escape, and that's as direct as the scene gets at depicting violence on children. I mentioned this scene, after someone here brought it up, to my girlfriend, who went to see the film with us, to warn her of the level of violence. She started to cry, not because of the film, mind you, but because she had been reading a book about Darfur and a very similar chapter, a true story, in which children were chained to a bus and burned alive. She was not, however, taken aback by the violence in the film. It was comic, it was cartoony, and at no point do I think she needed to tell herself "it's on a movie." She, and everyone else who attended, is an adult, and is capable of separating real life from cinema. If she wishes to get offended, upset, disturbed, or outraged by something, there are plenty of real-life issues with which she can occupy herself with. Film is an escape from that.

That, after all, is my point. There are films, Cannibal Holocaust, Last House on the Left, dozens of others, in which the violence on screen is graphic, it doesn't cut away, and it appears incredibly realistic. That is not the case with this film. While the script is intended to shock, as with many of the films it emulates, the filmmakers are capable and competent, and they know full well that showing the violence for the duration is not going to be the most filmic approach, or the best approach to tell the story. To involve the audience with the characters, you need their reactions, their responses, and despite how outlandish the story is, I genuinely felt involved with the characters and was concerned for their well-being or wished for their demise, respectively. All in all, I thought it was a fantastic film for what their were trying to achieve, and judging from the applause and amount of questions asked of the director, no one was disappointed.

I should also add that the director and crew were very nice, insightful, and intelligent people. They weren't sadists, misanthropes, or any sort of negative tag which could be thrown on a filmmaker of this sort. They simple love the genre, know how it works, and work within it. I was very happy to have seen the film in that setting.

There's one thing this film proved, regardless of critical opinion; Canadians can still make gory, over-the-top violent films if they want to. Soviet Canuckistan can have fictional films just as nasty as anyone else's.