Hobo with a Shotgun

“A fierce, perfervid, and sometime hilarious splatterfest that riffs on grindhouse classics like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Warriors, Death Wish, The Exterminator, and Escape From New York, Jason Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun is a singular debut in recent Canadian cinema. Rutger Hauer stars as an unnamed hobo who journeys to the big city to buy a lawnmower — and quickly runs afoul of a psychotic, white-suited gangster named The Drake (Brian Downey) and his two equally screwed-up sons, Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman). As gruesome and grisly as any film ever made in Canada, Hobo with a Shotgun boasts the same encyclopedic knowledge of schlock one finds in a Tarantino movie, with a similarly campy, dumpster-diving, postmodern self-consciousness. Yet the film’s well-crafted crudeness also invests it with a kind of twisted sincerity à la Death Wish and The Exterminator and unlike the well-funded sheen of Tarantino’s work. Prominent cameos from domestic TV stars gives the film a decidedly Canadian flavour” (Toronto I.F.F.). Colour, 35mm. 86 mins.