Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)
Directed by Jason Eisener
A vigilante homeless man pulls into a new city and finds himself trapped in urban chaos, a city where crime rules and where the city's crime boss reigns. Seeing an urban landscape filled with armed robbers, corrupt cops, abused prostitutes and even a pedophile Santa, the Hobo goes about bringing justice to the city the best way he knows how - with a 20-gauge shotgun. Mayhem ensues when he tries to make things better for the future generation. Street justice will indeed prevail.
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What critics compared Hobo with a Shotgun to
With its vibrant visual style and outrageously colorful use of gore, the comparisons between "Hobo with a Shotgun" and "Turbo Kid" are more than warranted; even "Hobo" director Jason Eisener has a small cameo in the film.
It's easy to see how that would have been the case, and it shares more than a few stylistic similarities with Jason Eisener's violent B-movie, "Hobo with a Shotgun", which makes sense considering Eisener exec-produces and has a small cameo.
Like Eisener’s Hobo with a Shotgun, Turbo Kid is a conscious bolt-on to a canon of low-budget exploitation movies, made when belts were tight but concepts high.
Originally submitted as an entry for one of producer Ant Timpson’s ABCs of Death anthologies, but then expanded to feature length, Turbo Kid is, along with Jason Eisener’s Hobo With A Shotgun (2011), Lowell Dean’s WolfCop (2014) and David Sandberg’s Kung Fury (2015), a loving postmodern pastiche of Eighties excess, setting (with hilariously daft incongruity) its extreme sadism and gore alongside a great deal of sweetness and genuine charm.
Jason Eisener, he of Hobo With a Shotgun and the “Slumber Party Alien Abduction” segment from V/H/S/2, produced the film, and it shows.
Working the same tribute/send-up mode that injected life into “Death Proof,” “Planet Terror,” and “Machete,” “Hobo with a Shotgun” fails to create a giddy impression, instead submitting a completely obnoxious take on B-movie theatrics, with the film more obsessed with noise than a slick sense of mischief.
Unlike “Death Proof” and “Machete,” it’s not really trying to teach a message or be artistic.
This makes it the fourth of the Grindhouse features, after Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof , the original Grindhouse double feature, and Rodriguez's 2010 Machete .
It is certainly ultra-violent and ridiculous enough to tick all the boxes, but this homeless-exploitation film is a far cry from Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez’s Machete.
Grindhouse offers the best example of this difference: Planet Terror being pretty lousy in every respect while Death Proof was made as a B-movie but in every way both captured the spirit of the style and transcended it.
While Cage gets his John Wick moment to hunt down evil opponents, the film’s gnarly gore that flows in the second half is probably more akin to the heightened excesses of Hobo with a Shotgun.
Imagine if Hobo with a Shotgun took an entire sheet of LSD and you'll start to scratch the surface of Mandy's unique madness.
You don’t envision saccharine subtexts, weird Sin City allusions (our hero seems to be ‘blessed’ with the same confused brain as Mickey Rourke’s Marv - and he loves to mention it), and the last act arrival of what looks like rejects from a futuristic renaissance fair.
Hauer has prowled such hyperviolent environs many times in such movies as " Blind Fury " and " Sin City ."
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The presence of Hobo With a Shotgun’s Jason Eisener as second-unit director is evident in the gushy splatter FX, which sadly taper off about halfway through the movie.
The violence "Copshop" offers up is pretty standard exploitation film material, like what you'd see in "Hobo With a Shotgun" or "Machete."