HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN: You Can Never Go Home (To The Grindhouse) Again

Try as you might, you can’t make a real grind­house film today.  The rea­son for this sim­ple: grind­house films were a prod­uct of a par­tic­u­lar place and time, an era of social/cultural upheaval when an enter­pris­ing hus­tler could make a film for noth­ing with min­i­mal inter­fer­ence and get it dis­trib­uted all over the world.  Everything about mod­ern film­mak­ing — from the cur­rent zeit­geist to the devel­op­ment process to mod­ern film dis­tri­b­u­tion — works against what we once called grind­house filmmaking.

On a deeper level, peo­ple for­get that grind­house films weren’t designed to be cult movies.  They were sim­ply designed to make money from a seg­ment of the pub­lic that the major stu­dios ignored — and any per­son­al­ity put into these films came from film­mak­ers try­ing to inno­vate within the con­fines of what most con­sid­ered to be a throw­away style of film­mak­ing.  The grind­house films that res­onated with audi­ences after their sell-by dates — Jack Hill’s Pam Grier vehi­cles, Last House On The Left, I Spit On Your Grave, etc. — became clas­sics with the cult movie crowd because they bravely explored provoca­tive sub­ject mat­ter and did so with an oft-ignored sense of artistry.

By com­par­i­son, most mod­ern attempts at grind­house film­mak­ing fall flat because they set­tle for being super­fi­cial exer­cises in style.  Whether they come from the low bud­get end or the high bud­get end, nuevo-grindhouse fare strains to con­vince its audi­ence that is out­ra­geous on the strength of con­tent alone.  It rarely tries to con­vey a mes­sage or any sin­cere emo­tion — and instead pumps up the lev­els of blood­shed and nudity to earn its street cred with the fan­boy brigade.  That’s not grind­house film­mak­ing — it’s just an excuse for self-indulgent film­mak­ers to imi­tate what they’ve seen with­out hav­ing to try very hard.

This nuevo-grindhouse trend may have reached its nadir with the recent release of Hobo With A Shotgun.  This film began as a faux-trailer that won a con­test spon­sored by the pro­duc­ers of Grindhouse, even man­ag­ing to play along­side that film dur­ing its Canadian the­atri­cal run, and sparked enough inter­est to earn its own fea­ture length ver­sion à la Machete.  Sadly, the result­ing film proves that what might work for a minute or two quickly grows tire­some when padded out to 85 minutes.

The fea­ture ver­sion of Hobo With A Shotgun does attempt to graft a plot­line onto its chaotic may­hem: the Hobo (Rutger Hauer) jumps off a train and finds him­self in Scum Town, a por­trait of urban blight drenched in trash and graf­fiti.  It is run by sadis­tic crimelord Drake (Brian Downey), who is assisted by his sons Slick (Gregory Smith) and Ivan (Nick Bateman).  Hobo tries to stay incog­nito but snaps when he sees Slick man­han­dling Abby (Molly Dunsworth), the arche­typal hooker with a heart of gold.  He saves her and gets fur­ther side­tracked when he attempts to fight the onslaught of crime in Scum Town.  This causes Drake and his sons to fight back, lead­ing to a series of show­downs that esca­late as they paint the screen with arte­r­ial spray and gunfire.

Unfortunately, the exe­cu­tion fails to do jus­tice to the slen­der but work­able premise.  .  Like many attempts to imi­tate vin­tage b-movies, Hobo With A Shotgun feels like the film­mak­ers are work­ing through a check­list of “out­ra­geous” things they want to do.  The char­ac­ters func­tion as card­board arche­types and the sto­ry­line is just barely there, serv­ing as a flimsy pre­text for a lengthy series of set­pieces.  When the film does try to slow down for scenes where char­ac­ters actu­ally talk to each other, the writ­ing falls flat because it lacks the basic level of sub­stance needed to sup­port these moments.

The weak writ­ing is ampli­fied by mem­o­rably lousy, self-conscious per­for­mances.  Hauer and Dunsworth are the only ones who actu­ally try to act but they have too lit­tle to work with to make their efforts stick.  Everyone else just mugs shame­lessly for the cam­era while shout­ing their lines as loudly as pos­si­ble, a fac­tor that makes Hobo With A Shotgun the most annoy­ingly shrill film in recent mem­ory.  Most of the cast is try­ing way too hard to be out­ra­geous — and like the film­mak­ers, they fail to rec­og­nize that when you start off at top vol­ume, you have nowhere left to go.

The one real sur­prise is that for a film that is mar­ket­ing itself as the ulti­mate grind­house homage, Hobo With A Shotgun doesn’t really look like a vin­tage grind­house film.  It’s obvi­ous that a lot of work went into Karim Hussein’s color-saturated cin­e­matog­ra­phy but its Technicolor-in-overdrive look is the antithe­sis of the grimy, desa­t­ured look asso­ci­ated with most grind­house fare.  Instead, it looks like they were either try­ing to cater to a youth­ful crowd raised on video games and music videos.

Finally, and most impor­tantly, Jason Eisener’s direc­tion con­fuses being fre­netic with being kinetic.  Like so many other ele­ments in his film, his direct­ing is fran­ti­cally intense from the get-go and finds lit­tle mod­u­la­tion as it goes along.  Even worse, the much-vaunted set­pieces are all pretty much the same: peo­ple shout and wave around weapons, there are out­bursts of gore punc­tu­ated by ran­cid one-liners, rewind and repeat.  You can only see so many crushed heads or explod­ing stom­achs before it starts to get bor­ing — and the fast edit­ing (also han­dled by Eisener) fur­ther adds to the numb­ing qual­ity of these poorly orches­trated scenes.  The end result isn’t much dif­fer­ent from the awful hor­ror remakes that Michael Bay pro­duces through his Platinum Dunes com­pany — it just has a trendy “grind­house” tag on it to fool the gullible.

In fair­ness to Hobo With A Shotgun, it is get­ting a lot of good reviews from fan­boy and main­stream crit­ics alike.  However, that just illus­trates how neb­u­lous the nuevo-grindhouse trend is.  The film’s defend­ers all seem to think the word grind­house just means a bar­rage of cheap gore served up with a wink from the film­mak­ers that says “it’s meant to be bad.” Anyone who has stud­ied the his­tory of grind­house fare knows that there is much more to a grind­house clas­sic than just being explicit — films like Rolling Thunder and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre remain pop­u­lar decades after the fact because they are built on a foun­da­tion of strong, brave film­mak­ing. In com­par­i­son, it’s hard to fore­see Hobo With A Shotgun hav­ing that kind of shelf life because it is just bad mod­ern film­mak­ing in ill-fitting b-movie drag.  If this is the future of “grind­house” film­mak­ing, per­haps it is bet­ter to let it die out now.