If nothing else, Hobo With A Shotgun lives up to the title. Buy a ticket and you’ll see a homeless Rutger Hauer use a shotgun to splatter gallons of blood all over the screen and into the audience’s hearts. It’s a down and dirty exploitation movie with a deliciously sick sense of humour guaranteed to offend and delight.
What’s surprising is that this trashy fun is Canadian and a personal project for debut director, Jason Eisner. The project began in Eisner’s childhood when he and longtime friend-turned-co-writer John Davis fuelled their impressionable minds with gory genre movies.
“We had a shed in my parents’ backyard that we basically lived in with a VCR, a television, and a couple of bunks,” Eisner told Metro. “We would go to a video store down the street everyday and watch movies all night. We cleaned out their sci-fi, action, and horror sections in one summer.”
Adolescent movie marathons would turn into filmmaking ambitions for the pair, who initially made Hobo With A Shotgun as a fake trailer that won a competition associated with Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse in 2007.
“We were starting to make a feature length version for no money with friends on the weekends when we went to the Grindhouse premiere in LA,” explained Eisner. “That night I got a call from Alliance saying that they wanted to release our trailer with Grindhouse theatrically and talk about developing the idea into a feature film.”
With that simple phone call, Eisner transformed from a hungry film fan into a professional filmmaker. Next week his blood-soaked vision debuts across Canada, promising one of the most depraved and giddily entertaining cinematic experiences to ever come out of our country. It’s something the filmmaker hopes won’t be an isolated incident.
“Hopefully this might open some doors to make more movies like this in Canada. I’d love it, because we could make some pretty insane cinema up here if given the chance.”
