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83Loaded to the gills with thrill-inducing mayhem, Hobo with a Shotgun feels almost tribal in its commitment to violence.
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May 5, 201180Hit the B-movie sweet spot just right, as Jason Eisener mostly does in his gleefully gory Hobo with a Shotgun, and you could find yourself living the dream.
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May 2, 201180One must grudgingly admire director Jason Eisener's willingness to go over the top and beyond, and the film certainly delivers what it promises.
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75Moralists, beware. Hobo looks like a garish cartoon puked up by a filmmaker overstuffed with cheap thrills and celluloid scuzz. What's not to like?
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75It's a hyper-violent, self-conscious throwback, with the sickly plastic aroma of a tape that's been gathering dust in the corner of a video store since 1984.
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75In its mocking but acutely observed style, Hobo is a well-designed cinematic mess: There are whiplash jump cuts, patches where the sound almost disappears, and the whole thing is projected in a queasy, faded Technicolor.
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70There's something pure about the crude pleasures of Hobo with a Shotgun, a pre-fab cult film that aspires to nothing more (or less) than the red-meat feeding of a feral midnight-movie audience.
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70Only for those with a truly bottomless appetite for gore and fan-boy humor.
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May 2, 201170A generic blast, Hobo with a Shotgun unspools like a spaghetti western but amped with enough testosterone to fill a video-game warehouse.
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70There's something appealing about the movie's unpretentious carnival of carnage, although I could have done without the flamethrower assault on a school bus to raise the stakes.
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67There's a pomo twist to the whole overeager enterprise, in all its theoretical, film-school charm: Similar to 2010's "Machete," the movie was born from a fake trailer commissioned by Grindhouse directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez.
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60Two monologues-one in which the Hobo compares himself to a bear, the other a Travis Bickle–like screed delivered to a roomful of increasingly distressed babies-are damn near Shakespearean. It's a shame the performance is contained in a Z-movie patchwork that's a bit too knowingly repugnant.
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60Hobo is trash cinema through and through and gives fans everything they want from a drive-in throwback. That's something that doesn't happen often.
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50A continuous parade of slaughter.
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50There's plenty of blood and screaming and mayhem, and it's not particularly well-staged, shot or cut -- though I suppose actually caring about film craft denotes one as a spoilsport in this context.
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May 3, 201150Pick a reason to balk at this spot-on, garishly threadbare paean to '80s no-budget sleaze.
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40It's an ode, of sorts, to Seventies grindhouse cinema, curdled and gooey and tailor-made for midnight showings (preferably with a crowd, preferably intoxicated).
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38Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."
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38Hobo hits the screen as a grim, visually ugly, intermittently funny-occasionally preachy piece with only the estimable Mr. Hauer to recommend it.
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25Japan's Takashi Miike has the formula down pat, but Eisener has no idea how to give violence a touch of class.
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0Is it good bad? Nah. It's just bad. It's so bad it makes "Machete," the other movie based on a mock trailer from "Grindhouse," look like high-gloss Kubrickian satire.
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0Quite the most appalling piece of junk I have seen lately, Hobo With a Shotgun just lies there like an autopsy.