HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN
Studio: Yer Dead Productions
Publisher: Transmission
Format: Blu-Ray (Reviewed), DVD
Release Date: Out Now
Price: $34.99 – Available Here
Overview
Rutger Hauer is a homeless man on a mission to clean-up the streets of Hope Town, a small, but vile town that he has moved into after travelling along the back of a train. Hobo With A Shotgun is an incredibly awesome film, that, at points, even made this reviewer feel a little off viewing. It is certainly not a film for everyone, but it is definitely a film that everyone should see, to at least be able to see the direction of wrongness that humanity seems to be heading in.
Hobo With A Shotgun also has one of my more favourite movie goons, The Plague, who are a pretty awesome concept in themselves. Beware them.
Story
Hobo With A Shotgun surprisingly has a very decent story for a movie that may seem like a silly concept to so many people. The movie starts off with Rutger Hauer heading into an unfamiliar town –Â Hope Scum Town – on the back of train. After his arrival he soon finds that the entire town is corrupted by hate and fear, while also being under the influence of the evil mobster like character “The Drake”.
The story in Hobo With A Shotgun feels as though it was thought up as a collaboration between internet trolls and aggressively repressed teenagers, but the way that it is told is simply amazing. It’s the kind of film that you would use as an analogy to describe something else. For instance, if you wanted to talk about a near indestructible demonic foe, you could say that they were like The Plague in Hobo.
Scum Town itself is a very interesting location within the film. It is easily the most vile and corrupt portions of humanity put on display for all to see. What I found particularly interesting in regards to Scum Town within the story was how the entire town seemed to be the secondary villain of the film. The town itself was such a powerful foe that it was able to turn a Hobo to violence in order to repair the blight on the face of the Earth that it was. This town was full of so much vile scummery and villainy, but it was never an unbelievable amount.
I think the reason that the town was so believable was that it seemed to reference all the bad things that seemed to have cropped up in popular culture. Internet shows like Bum Fights make an appearance in the film, as well as the whole punk subculture (although it’s way more corrupt than its real-life counterpart), which make it that much more realistic and relatable to the viewer. I’d like to think that the producers of this film were trying to make a statement on the current affairs of humanity on this planet by the way that the town blatantly satirises current human behaviour, but I may be reading too far into the film.
Ultimately the story in Hobo With A Shotgun is way more amazing than you would think by just looking at the cover and reading the title. However, the rating is very much earned, there is no way in hell I’d let anyone under the restriction even glance at this movie for a second. To be quite honest, we have very tight cencorship here in Australia and I’m kind of surprised that a film with a bus full of children being flamethrowered to death was allowed to be released in this country.
Audio and Visuals
Hobo With A Shotgun is VERY reminiscent of a Quentin Tarantino film, and even a lot of Japanese films. There is copious amounts of blood and gore everywhere, and in a few scenes, it is as though some characters have sprinklers installed throughout their bodies. The main aspect of the film that shows this influence is the old style opening and closing credits, the classic takes and shots, as well as the very colourful colour processing over the film.
Seriously, I really liked the way that the film was brightly coloured in opposition to the dark and evil that lay within Scum Town. It’s this contrast that captures you off guard when some of the earlier explicit scenes crop up, it makes you question why such scenes are being presented in such a cheerful scheme. Could it be because of how current society takes glee in such abusive behaviour? Maybe, or maybe it was just a stylistic choice by the director? I’m not entirely sure, but it does add a huge amount of depth to the film.
The costumes in this movie are amazingly realistic and seem to portray the characters that reside within them quite well. The Drake wear a white suit befitting of a gangster type of character, or even a James Bond villain. His sons, Ivan and Slick wear matching tracksuit jackets, which makes them seem like the bullying jocks from Highschool, and the prostitute Abby wears a combination of normal clothes and garish whore-clothing depending on the scene. It seems as though all the characters are reflected by their choices in wardrobe, which is quite good work by the visuals department on the film.
One thing that I thought would disappoint me with the film, but didn’t, was the fact that it only supported 2 speaker audio, instead of surround sound. However, after watching the film, I can attest that it is a non-issue. In-fact, the film featured quite awesome audio, in particular was the background score.
My favourite aspect of the film, audio-wise, was all of the characters dialogue. Sure it was quite cheesy in some moments, and cliche in others, but it was always clever and always fitted the scene nicely. One really strong piece of dialogue in the film is in the scene where the Hobo is addressing a group of newborns in a hospital. He has some pretty good insight into how they would turn out living in Scum Town and how “they wouldn’t know it was wrong in the first place”.
Extras
Hobo With A Shotgun has a small but interesting selection of Special Features that accompany the movie on the movie disc. These are particularly standard features, but are still pretty interesting.
“More Blood. More Heart”, The making of Hobo With a Shotgun, is an interesting 40min feature that takes us through some of the highlights while making the film. It also includes short interviews and other kinds of interesting information from the cast and crew.
The Production Blog essentially blogs about the production of the film, it has some pretty interesting information within. The film also features Camera test footage and a plethora of deleted scenes, inclusing an alternative ending where the films leading female, Abby, becomes a part of The Plague. All the cut-scenes are pretty interesting to watch.
And lastly, the disc contains the Directors Red Band trailer, which is essentially a trailer of the film shown on red band. It’s pretty cool.
Overall
Hobo With a Shotgun is quite an amazing film which is surprisingly quite well written and directed, in comparison the the initial reaction as to how silly the concept seems. While it is an amazingly gory film that touches on themes that are not suitable for people below the age restriction, it does seem to have a decent commentary on the current operation of humanity within the world. Keep your nose down and out of trouble, or become part of the problem yourself. Inaction is just as bad as participation, etc.
