abstract
| - The 2011 film Hobo With A Shotgun started out as a fake movie trailer in Grindhouse, but thanks to independent filmmakers from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, it became the second Grindhouse trailer (after Machete) to get converted into a full film. An elderly, nameless hobo (Rutger Hauer) arrives in the city of Hope Town, a run-down dystopian sprawl somewhere in America. The Hobo only wants to eke out a humble life in the city, but thanks to The Drake (the depraved crime boss who controls the city), urban decay runs rampant and violence has become a way of life. Tension builds as The Hobo tries to co-exist with the city-wide corruption, but when circumstances push him over the edge, he picks up a twelve-gauge and delivers bloody justice to the city's criminals. While the film's story makes for an overly broad -- and overly grotesque -- pastiche of the Vigilante Justice sub-genre of exploitation cinema (represented by films such as Death Wish), Hauer contrasts the outlandishly violent story with his subtle performance -- or, at least, as subtle a performance he can turn in while playing an old train-hopping hobo battling some of the most ludicrously evil characters ever conceived.
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