Hobo with a Shotgun – review

Clips from non-existent films have been a regular cinematic feature for years, but I'm not sure when the first fake trailer appeared. There were several in John Landis's sketch comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), including a beauty for the enticing "Catholic High School Girls in Trouble", and a couple the following year in the interval of the spoof 1930s double bill that constitutes Stanley Donen's seriously neglected Movie Movie . A couple of years ago Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez included a number in Grindhouse , their double bill of parodic exploitation films that never reached this country in its original form. The Canadian release of Grindhouse , however, was apparently accompanied by a joke trailer for a cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick with the in-your-face title Hobo with a Shotgun . This has now become an authentic cheap, sadistic, gross-out horror flick. Shot in deliberately garish colour, it stars Rutger Hauer as a grizzled tramp who arrives by rail in a hellish American community and takes on an outrageous gang of murderous local bullies. It should have remained a trailer. Most Hauer movies go straight to those bins that were once a feature of video stores. This one belongs at the bottom of a disused coal mine in one of those desperately impoverished West Virginia townships that advertise for people to send them their nuclear waste.