There's no reason to reiterate the fact that I created a site where people can recommend movies for me to watch. You've probably heard all about it already. The first movie for me to watch off this list was Hobo with a Shotgun, suggested by my French buddy Mickael.

Our film starts out with the titular Hobo - who never actually receives a name - rolling into a town presumably in Canada. The opening music is chipper, the sky is a highly saturated blue, and life in general seems to be just swell. Three minutes later, some dude has shoved down a manhole, a rope tossed around his neck, and a truck yanking his head off. It rains blood and some random chick in a bikini dances in it. This pretty much sets the tone for the remainder of the film until until our Hobo friend gets sick and tired of the wanton killing that seems to plague the town. He buys himself a shotgun and becomes the hero that Namelessville deserves. Oh, and he also befriends a stripper along the way.

Hobo with a Shotgun is pretty much everything I anticipated it would be; campy, cheesy, and violent for the sake of violence. There's no message, no point, just an excuse to watch people get their hands shoved into the whirling blade of a lawn mower. Which actually leads me to a musing. Along the way, Mr. Hobo gets letters carved into his chest with a knife, beat up, and stomped repeatedly by a dude wearing ice skates. But does that keep our intrepid protagonist down? No, not really, no. Give him a night of sleep and he's back up like nothing happened. Even his stripper companion nearly gets her head sawed off, but a couple hours in the ER and all is right again. Dialogue is equally cheesy, culminating in a scene where the Hobo is addressing babies in a hospital nursery about the bleak future and that, with any luck, they won't become a hobo with a shotgun like him.

The visual effects are relatively decent, I guess. I mean, once you've seen one movie with tons of blood and gore, you've seen most of them. Nothing too new or interesting here. Every scene seems to be hyper saturated, creating many shots that look almost mono- or dual-chromatic. Example on that last point, the finale is lit with a cyan light on one half and an orange on the other. After the extreme color correction, the effect is kind of nifty.

All in all, it was a pretty stupid movie. Everything was over the top and an obvious homage to the exploitation films of yore. I wouldn't really recommend it to anybody unless they get a kick out of mindless violence.

Rating - 2.5/5

EDIT: I forgot to mention the part where one of the baddies burns a bus full of kids with Disco Inferno playing in the background. Nothing more need be said.