Canadian Carnage

Hobo with a Shotgun

** out of ****

Directed by: Jason Eisener

Starring: Rutger Hauer, Molly Dunsworth, Brian Downey, Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman

Running time: 87 minutes

Hobo with a Shotgun originated as a faux-trailer with the Canadian release of the masturbatory B-flick celebration known as Grindhouse. Legend has it that the fake advert was shot for $150 in pizza money – which makes sense since the new film version is pure cheese.

However, the cheese is an odorous and unpleasant one that sours the taste of the initially promising take on exploitation pictures. It’s a slimy genre flick that’s ultimately not very satisfying.

Portrayed by Dutch actor Rutger Hauer, most notable for sinister roles in Blade Runner and The Hitcher, our title character doesn’t even get a name. He does get a motive, though. Our homeless tramp walks around Hope Town (cute name), Nova Scotia, with a grocery cart full of supplies and signs asking for change. Once he gets $50, he can purchase a lawn mower and start a gardening business.

Until then, he has to avoid the eyes of a sneering kingpin named Drake (Brian Downey) and his two sadistic cronies (Gregory Smith and Nick Bateman) as they terrorize the local community.

Our hero seeks refuge in the decrepit apartment of a prostitute named Abby (Molly Dunsworth), a target on the lowlife alleyways where she repeatedly sells her body. He vows to protect her and challenge the repugnant ways of Drake and company by, well, firing back with a vengeance.

Hobo with a Shotgun is a trashy flick under the misguided assumption that all it could do is lap up onerous buckets of gore, gratuitous pounds of unadulterated flesh and embarrassingly over-the-top one-liners to its audience.

The film wants to be tasteless fun, but director Jason Eisener, a native of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, works hard to pile the screen with mindless filth and depravity, but doesn't concentrate on very much on the rest of the material.

There seems to have been more thought put into the film’s cruel shenanigans and killings by its screenwriter John Davies than onto the plight of the protagonist. The off-kilter tonal balance between self-conscious comic amusement and bloody, putrid glory rarely works when there is so much vile nature on display.

That’s not to fault the actors, many of whom seem to be enjoying chewing up all of the trashy scenery. Hauer is also a hoot, even offering shades of a pummeled struggle between his routs of carnage and ultra-stylized monologues. One wishes the crew behind Hobo with a Shotgun would’ve learned how to balance the two extremes just as well as Hauer.

Maybe I’m being too harsh about a film called Hobo with a Shotgun, which nary a soul will go to see to analyze its merits as a work of art (or even as its status as a Canadian film, even though it takes place in a reality that’s not often seen in the Great White North).

I think it was at the point of the film about halfway-through when an entire bus of young children are massacred by two cronies wielding a flamethrower that my expectations started to dim. Grindhouse flicks have every right to be shameless, over-the-top and exploitative, but they shouldn’t make us feel queasy.