Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)

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The city in Hobo with a Shotgun is a cesspool of crime and brutality because a powerful monster rules it. The citizenry of this hellhole are scared to death because “The Drake” is a crazed sadist who loves the fear his rule brings, with two sons (who dress in Starter jackets and wear ray bans mimicking 80s Tom Cruise; they also drive a car similar to the Delorean from Back to the Future, the closing song very much an 80s pop tune you might hear at the end of a song from that particular decade) who are just as ruthless as he is. These three laugh and celebrate when they destroy people and bask in the glory of their terror. The rugged pauper known as “Hobo” becomes fed up with the violence and horror that he sees on a daily basis, packs a shotgun he lifts from a store and starts ridding the streets of the vermin who have brought nothing but evil and cruelty to innocent people.

Before the Hobo goes vigilante, he tries the right way. Slick, Drake’s volatile younger son, snaps a teenager’s arm for not paying him money for dope, almost takes a whore for a dangerous joyride and is punched in the face by the Hobo who brings this scumbag to the police station. Hobo, however, doesn’t realize that the Chief of Police is corrupt, in Drake’s hip pocket. The Chief allows Drake’s boys to cut him up and toss him in the trash. It will take Hobo’s own brand of vigilante justice to carve a bloody trail just as Slick cut SKUM into his chest.



This Hellhole City has every kind of horror imaginable. Hobo views this madness, such as a psychotic pimp, a giggling pederast in a Santa Claus suit driving a car with a pleading child crying for help as she bangs her fists against the back seat glass, a cretin with a camcorder who pays desperate people to take a beating or chew broken glass (among other atrocities, Hobo actually eats broken glass, later returning to get awesome revenge), among other criminal scum who commit any number of inhuman acts. There’s one horrifying scene where Slick and Ivan decide to board a school bus full of kids with blow torches, setting them on fire! It’s simple: these various infidels are so cruel, ruthless, vile, and sick, you will celebrate their demise and revel in Hobo’s violent methods. That shotgun leaves a definite impression, and The Drake finally has an adversary who threatens to bring his reign to an end. The carnage left in his wake is epic.

“You vultures--circle the city tearing off the flesh of everything that is innocent.”

My favorite newspaper article title during Hobo’s “cleansing of the streets” is “Parents Smile as Bodies Pile”. Of course, when the Hobo starts taking the headlines away from The Drake he answers back in kind by having his corrupt police force and other slime willing to commit murder for the hell of it find and slaughter the homeless, which includes one scene where a woman and her baby are burned alive inside a trash bin!

Slick and Ivan eventually find where Hobo has a place to stay, with Abbie, the whore who wants more out of life than providing a service for the depraved and this really sets the movie off. Slick, The Drake’s prized boy, gets his dick shot off while Ivan must exit the premises after suffering an electrocution when his skate blade catches the inside of a toaster Hobo uses to protect himself (not before multiple stab wounds in the back). Poor Abbie suffers her share of body damage before the film is over: Slick cuts into her neck with a hack saw and Drake sticks her hand in a spinning blade! No one escapes unharmed that’s for sure.



Slick’s fate is probably my favorite scene, how we see him being taken away in the burning school bus, charred in black, taking him to hell. The shotgun ultra violence really is the ticket gore item for the movie. Heads are blown apart, bodies are torn to pieces, and stomachs spew globs of blood, the works. You also get punks using bumper cars to crush an old man’s head to mulch, not to mention, a poor fellow hanging upside down in The Drake’s lair, getting clubbed by blindfolded whores, later disemboweled by a bat with razor blades!

This movie just gets more and more bizarre as it continues. The Drake summons “The Plague”, two ominous assassins in full metal suits of armor, who, in the search of Hobo, annihilate the nursing staff on call in the hospital where Abbie is being treated from the neck hacksaw wound. When The Plague capture Hobo, imprisoning him temporarily in a cell, he peeps out a small hole and sees them contending with some sort of creature with octopus tentacles—what the hell was this all about?!?!

Rutger Hauer is a legend to B-movie aficionados like myself. Hobo with a Shotgun just augments his legacy for those of us who love practically everything he stars in. Sure his character has lost some of his marbles but if you witness the same atrocities he does throughout The Drake’s Hellhole City you might not come away unscathed psychologically either. Hauer has a terrific scene where he addresses a maternity ward with babies, speaking about what they will probably wind up as, prostitutes and crackheads, maybe even a Hobo with a Shotgun, although he does hope they find a better life than what is currently plaguing the streets. There are times where he talks gibberish, especially to Abbie, but these are his most endearing moments, with her, away from the violence, death, and destruction, where he talks about bears, her being a teacher, and starting up a lawnmowing business.

The movie has a comic book look to it, with lots of bright colors, graffiti walls, trash in the streets and sidewalks, weary public faces, a city with its fair share of fiends and sickos who have a safe haven in this nightmarish world until a savior in rags packs a shotgun and turns avenger for the downtrodden and victimized.



I was definitely amused with how this film opens, startled to tell you the truth, so serene with lush green pastures and picturesque environs, an Eden compared to the Hell Hobo is about to inhabit once he steps off of the train box car (perhaps the worst mistake he could've made, or was it? He did serve a purpose and rid the streets of a sadistic dictator.).