“When life gives you razor blades, you make a baseball bat… covered in razor blades.”

Like Machete (2010), Jason Eisener’s Hobo With a Shotgun began its life as a fake trailer for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007), a double feature homage to retro schlock featuring Planet Terror (2007) and Death Proof (2007) Coming from two well-established directors, the project kicked off a mini wave of similar, lesser efforts. Unfortunately, Hobo With a Shotgun can be counted among those similar, lesser efforts. Where Machete saw Danny Trejo meting out violence with his namesake, Hobo With a Shotgun puts a firearm in the hands of B-movie all-star Rutger Hauer, who enters a derelict shantytown plagued by crime and ruled by a diabolical mob family (Brian Downey, Gregory Smith, Nick Bateman). After witnessing a heinous murder (a decapitation achieved with barbed wire, a manhole cover, and a moving car), having the word “scum” carved into his chest by the police chief (Jeremy Akerman), and befriending a hooker with a heart of gold (Molly Dunsworth), he buys a shotgun at a pawn shop and starts administering rough justice. It’s grossly violent stuff, a true throwback to 1980s video nasties, but the carnage is transparently aiming for black laughter. In the gruesome opening salvo, Ricky from Trailer Park Boys (2001–2018) is encumbered by an obviously rubber hunk of “cast iron” that keeps bending as he desperately tries to wriggle free; when the deed is finished, a half-naked woman ecstatically flails around in the geyser of blood shooting out of his neck. Elsewhere: a castration, a flamethrown bus of school children, chewed glass, a pair of armored demons, a pedophile dressed up as Santa Claus, death by ice skates. Hauer playing it completely straight helps a lot, but if it had come out in, say, 1979, it would just be another footnote. That is to say, its authenticity is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness.