Hobo With A Shotgun

Hobo With A Shotgun is a movie that began life as a fan-made fake trailer that won a place in Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s drive-in throwback Grindhouse. All respect to the creators winning a place on a feature film, which must have been damn cool, but in all honesty, Hobo With A Shotgun only has enough story, talent, and mot importantly, fun to sustain a trailer; a feature length film is just a terrible bore no matter how many exploding heads you cram into the work.
Also, I just want to put this out there: exploding heads are passe. As far as exploitation and horror are concerned, both Scanners and Maniac from 1980 closed the book on that little gimmick. Let's find something else. I'm all for someone's dick exploding, which, ironically considering (surprise) this is a negative review, Hobo With A Shotgun does contain. So maybe it's not all bad. But it's still not good.

Not to give a away to much, but this film features Rutger Hauer as the titular hobo who not surprisingly takes it upon himself to grab a shotgun and begun mowing down all the criminals in an unnamed city. I'm going to throw it out there, but like any B-movie fan worth his salt, I love Rutger Hauer. I'm not going to wax rhapsodic about his performance in Bladerunner though, I'm not the biggest fan of that film, but I will say, unlike most, I think he's damn awesome in Split-Second. Blind Fury is pretty bitching too. I might have to do them as a double-feature review one day, if for nothing else other than an excuse to re-watch both films. I'm not going to say Hauer is necessarily good in this movie, but he's not bad, and what he does do is lend this production so much needed credibility just by being there.

The biggest problem with Hobo With A Shotgun is that it tries so goddamn hard to be a Troma movie. The unnamed city the hobo wages war against, with its corrupt cops; stupid, unsympathetic citizens; and rampant violence may as well be Tromaville: the setting for all Troma movies. I've never been a fan of Troma movies; with output like The Toxic Avenger, Class of Nuke 'Em High, and Sgt. Kabukiman have far too much of a looney, anarchic bent to be any kind of quality cinema, trash or otherwise. Troma movies have no characters or story to speak of, just endless scenes of gore. This would all be fine and dandy, but when there's no reason to care about the gore and the gore is cheap and amateurish, I find little reason to actually watch the movie.
Hobo revels in these attitudes: every character besides the Hobo or the requisite hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold are evil and sadistic and take such glee from admittedly fun-loving activities as roasting grade-school students with a flamethrower, decapitating citizens with a barbed wire noose, or cutting medics behind the knees just to watch them flop. When the citizens of the city are turned against the hobo and resort to killing all his hobo-friends, including immolating a mother and her children, we're warned that the citizens still deserve to be saved because “they're scared, they're not bad.” The movie doesn't believe and neither do I. I'm sure the filmmakers are attempting to be satirical with their portrayal both of the citizens reactions to media-inspired fear (in this case regarding hobos) as well as the Hobo's own reaction to the situation (shotgunning everyone). None of the satire rings true simply because Hobo With A Shotgun is too in love with its own excess, namely burning children and exploding heads.

The gore effects of the film are pretty fantastic, they just all come down to either a shotgun to the head or the chest. There are some novelty injuries, but I'll leave them a surprise. Not that I recommend this movie, because simply it's crap. Worst of all it's boring. Hobo With A Shotgun is just another modern movie that attempts to cull cache but copying the look and possible feel of an exploitation film from the 1970s without and of the anger or maverick sensibilities. Too slick and over-produced to be exploitation, too boring and repetitive to be good trash cinema, Hobo With A Shotgun just meanders its way through 80 minutes hoping to get by on gore effects. Been there, done that, better luck next time.

* out of ****

Hell Night: Pray For More Movie Like This

“Pray for Day.” This is the tag-line for the ultimately-forgettable-but-loved-by-me 1981 slasher film Hell Night. As a demented young lad, my love of shock and trash cinema started with a little mom-and-pop video store called Magic Video. Remember those? Video stores pre-Blockbuster that had both “legit” cinema and porn? Coming of age, man. Also, on a semi-related tangent: fuck DVD and fuck Netflix; I long to a return to the halcyon days of 80-cents-a-night video rentals. VHS will live again, much like many of the antagonists in the movies featured on this blog.

Alright, no more tangents, time to get back on point. I first encountered this movie when I was 9 or 10 and perusing Magic Video for my weekend watches (Fridays me and my brothers was granted two rentals by my parental units; at a buck-sixty who could resist?), the cover art and tag-line for Hell Night grabbed me hard and refused to let go. Linda Blair, scared out of her wits, framed behind an imposing wrought iron fence and in front of a traditional horror-movie mansion all while fighting off an undead rapist. “Pray for Day” my ass, I'd be praying to get out of the situation a little earlier than that. Many a Friday night did I watch this movie with the remorseless glee that would come to define my adult life.

Time for a little synopsis. Hell Night is a complete rip-off of an H.P. Lovecraft story, “The Lurking Fear.” What, that doesn't tell you all you need to know? Alright, the similarities of the two works are such: There's an old-money rich family that more than anything else wanted some heirs to carry on the tradition of being rich; There's a problem with the heirs, namely they're all mongoloids; an insane father kills the entire family; one (or two) mongoloid sons survives through other reasons; one (or two) mongoloids sons haunts the local countryside or now-abandoned mansion kill any motherfucker prettier than them (everyone). The difference is that Hell Night strips all of Lovecraft's queasy racism from the story and includes drunken college cavorting. It's an improvement.

Hell Night was written by some people who never went to college, as none of these characters act like any college students I've ever known, but was written with a love for old urban legends. That's an improvement so I'm OK with it. The central selling point of Hell Night is to remove Lovecraft's story from it's rural setting and place it in the context of a college frat's tradition of “hell night” where pledges have to stay the night in the mansion where one (or two) mongoloid sons were spared a disappointed father's undying rage. Never in the story is it explained why, even though it's a tradition for pledges to spent the night in the mansion, the one (or two) mongoloid sons chose this moment to finally lose their shit and murder everyone in said mansion.

Not that it really matters, but I was curious while watching the movie.

So the review has been marginally rambling and even though I've been trash-talking Hell Night, it seems that I do enjoy the movie. So what's good about it? Aside from being released in the slasher mecca (1980-1982) with peers like Terror Train, Prom Night, Friday the 13^th, and My Bloody Valentine. Bonus question: how many of those flicks star Jaime Lee Curtis? While Hell Night does not star Jaime Lee Curtis, it does have another early-80s scream queen in Linda Blair. And I don't know, maybe it's me, but aside from giving a tough, confident, charming performance, she's also cute as a button. I dig Linda Blair. The other actors are fine: The douches are douches and the non-douches aren't douches and are reasonably sensible, which is fine for these movies. Horror movies are much harder to watch when the characters are bone-stupid. Great monster designs, fun effects, and a director that really understands the party/gothic/urban legend aspect of the story and Hell Night is a great, classic slasher movie mold. It does nothing new, but it delivers a solid 80 minutes of horror goodness.

***/****