Xixax Film Forum

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from my blog (http://modage.tumblr.com/post/3393774814/hobo-with-a-shotgun-review):
What happens when you set out to make a bad 80's movie and succeed? That's the question that was rolling around in my head during the 86 (never-ending) minutes of Hobo With A Shotgun last night. Originally conceived as a fan-made trailer to promote Grindhouse, this is the 2nd faux trailer to be turned into a feature film. Watching the trailer again, you can admire the film for not toning down any of that 2 minute clip's insanity, but at the same time it's clearly not a premise that can sustain a feature length. It's also difficult to reverse engineer a film around a series of nonsense scenes in a trailer to try to form any kind of coherent plot around.

But I know, I know, it's a movie called Hobo With A Shotgun so what did I expect? I guess I expected it to be more "fun" and not to be bludgeoned with an unwavering intensity that becomes numbing after more than a few minutes. (Every character shouting in every scene.) The film deeply saturated colors make your eyes bleed (in a good way I think), and Rutger Hauer is far better than the material he has to work with. I liked the Rodriguez/Tarantino Grindhouse double-feature but didn't think that I'd still be seeing films inspired by it 4 years later. I think the director here may be capable of better work but needs to understand there is a world of difference in 80s genre films like Escape From New York and The Running Man and the Z-grade crap like this aspires to be. The difference is watchability.