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Hobo with a Shotgun | 2011 | NR | - 5.10.10

A homeless man (Rutger Hauer) rides a freight train and gets off in a new town. The town boss (Brian Downey) oppresses the residents with help from his evil sons (Nick Bateman and Gregory Smith), controls crime and has the police in his pocket. The homeless man befriends a prostitute and uses a shotgun to mete out justice and rid the town of its oppressors. Also with Molly Dunsworth, Peter Sima, Jeremy Akerman, Glen Matthews, Drew O'Hara, Robb Wells and David Brunt. Directed by Jason Eisener. [1:24]

SEX/NUDITY 5 - Three women clad in bras and panties play with ball bats in a church basement (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details); we see some cleavage and the camera cuts briefly away and back to a waist-up shot of their bare breasts. A woman clad in sheer bra and panties dances in a shower of blood on the street (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details) and we see a small amount of cleavage. Throughout the film, a woman working as a prostitute wears a low-cut top that reveals significant cleavage and high-heeled boots with tight black short-shorts that reveal most of her bare thighs and legs; once she wears fishnet hose. In a brief scene, several scantily clad women stand together on a street while their pimp demands money from them and they run away.
 A child molester dressed as Santa Claus drives away with an 8-year-old girl screaming in the rear window in a sexual kidnapping. A man pushes a woman into a corner on the floor, jams his forefinger into her mouth, and says he will have sex with her; it doesn't happen.
 A woman works as a prostitute in a small town, but we do not see any sex acts. A thug and a police officer harass a woman working as a prostitute using numerous crude and sexually explicit slurs. A man tells a woman working as a prostitute, "I'm gonna break off your legs to get to your sweetness" and she replies, "My legs are closed for the night." An injured prostitute (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details) lies on a gurney in a hospital while a nurse and doctor give her CPR and the nurse yells a derogatory term for prostitute. A woman uses a sexually explicit term to describe what she does for a living.

VIOLENCE/GORE 10 - A man fires a gun into the air several times and tells a crowd watching a man being decapitated to cheer, and they do; a manhole cover is put around the latter man's neck, he is placed onto a manhole, and a coil of barbed wire is put around his neck and tied to a pickup truck that zooms off, cutting the neck in two and producing a gusher of blood (a woman sheer bra and panties dances in the blood and lies down in it while bystanders cheer at gunpoint).
 Two men attack another man and a woman and we see serious wounds and much blood; the wounded man shoots the penis off one of the men as the other one flees, and the injured man holds and waves his severed penis (it looks like a deflated red balloon) saying that his penis was blown off.
 A man blasts kidnappers of prostitutes, pimps, gang members and bullies (all the dead are male), amid gushing showers and rivers of blood in the streets: he shoots a pedophile dressed as Santa Claus (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details) at close range in a station wagon (we see only that the car fill with blood).
 There is a huge fight with many people: a woman kills a man, and another man cuts off one of her hands in a lawnmower and she uses her forearm bones to stab the man several times in the chest (we see a lot of gushing blood, bare bone and gore). A man throws a woman on a bed and saws her clavicle and throat with a hacksaw amid flowing blood; another man takes her to a hospital.
 Two men fire a flamethrower on a school bus full of kids; we see many flames, hear screaming, and then see the face of one small boy screaming in a flaming window. Three masked robbers hold a woman and a baby hostage, and another man grabs a loaded shotgun, blasts holes in the robbers' stomachs and shoots one in the head amid gushing blood. A man forces another man to kneel and kills him with shotgun shots amid showers of blood. Two men fight, and one shoots the other in the head and we see brains and blood flying.
 People are shown hanging by the neck from the ceiling in a hospital corridor and we see them being hacked with a ninja sword (there's a lot of blood) and when the power goes out, a red light comes on and reveals the eerie scene of people hanging from the ceiling.
 Three women dance around a man hanging by his feet from the ceiling of a church basement; they laugh and hit him with bats (we see some blood), and a man brings out a bat covered with razor blades and swings it as we hear the hanging man scream and see blood splatter as the women laugh. Many people with farming implements begin hacking homeless people apart and we see dozens of bloody bodies of men and women fall in heaps.
 A man yells, "We've got homeless to kill!" Other men gather and fire guns and rifles, killing a man in a deluge of rushing blood; many townspeople kill several men in another rush of blood and gore as a woman screams from off screen at the massacre.
 Two men run into a TV station broadcast, kill the anchorman with a hockey skate blade to the chest (there's some blood) and demand on air that all homeless people be executed; townspeople form mobs and hunt down transients. A man wearing a hockey skate kicks another man, catches the blade in a toaster and gets electrocuted and charred, but lives. A man wearing a hockey skate cuts a man's head off with the blade. A woman incites a mob to attack a man, she confronts him in an alley and threatens to kill his son, but the man kills him first.
 A police chief and another man beat a man, carve the word "scum" into his chest with a knife, and then toss him in a dumpster; we see some blood on the man's chest and rotting garbage on the street. A woman hides in a shopping cart under intestines, human heads and garbage.
 Two men put on hockey skates and stomp on people's feet (we see a lot of blood). A man pounds another man's foot with a sledgehammer and explodes into gushing blood. A man finds another man who pays people to hurt themselves while he films them; the man eats glass for money and we see blood and blood clots stream from his lips and two men fight until their faces are bloodied in front of the camera as well.
 A duo of armor-clad demons riding motorcycles drag a coffin behind them; they stop and pull a man out of the coffin and beat him up with some blood appearing. A Molotov cocktail blows up an alley dumpster where a woman and a child are hiding and we see smoke and flames.
 Women hanging from the ceiling by their wrists are covered in blood but we cannot see wounds; two men keep them in that position in a basement until ready to go out on prostitute tricks.
 In a hospital scene, a doctor grabs crutches and walkers away from patients, pushes them out of the way, and draws a gun and fires unsuccessfully at an armor-clad demon. After killing a "bad cop" that is about to rape a prostitute, a man is chased by several people, shouting and waving ball bats, hoes, shovels, axes, clubs, and lit Tiki torches.
 Two men walk into an arcade and harass a boy until a woman intervenes and one of the men takes her outside and says he will kill her; another man knocks him out with a cane and a sock filled with coins. A man takes a criminal to the police and tells them to round up all the criminals, put them in dump trucks and bury them in the dump.
 A duo of armor-clad demons live in a basement dungeon with a huge octopus, whose waving tentacles are seen in a doorway; on one wall is a collection of portraits of assassinated people with red slashes painted across the eyes, suggesting the two killed them all (from Caesar to Lincoln to Jesus Christ and others).
 A man tells two other men to get rid of a man. An old man tells a woman that a bear's claw will rip a face right off a skull. A man announces that he will execute a man in the town square.
 A vampire statue vomits blood in a graveyard.

LANGUAGE 10 - About 118 F-words, 9 sexual references, 15 scatological references, 13 anatomical references, 14 mild obscenities, 1 derogatory term for homosexuals, name-calling (crazy, androids, murderer, pervert, fool, hero, worthless, street man, garbage man, crack heads, dopers, homeless), stereotypical references to bystanders, the homeless, drug users, prostitutes and child molesters, 8 religious profanities, 12 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - At an arcade two thugs rub a boy's face in a pile of cocaine, he comes up laughing hysterically, other people rush forward and snort the pile away as the scene ends, and in front of a maternity ward baby window, an elderly man tells the babies that if they stay in that town they will be subjected to crack heads and dope users and end up like them. A man and a woman drink from a liquor bottle and she uses some of the liquor to clean out a shallow wound on his chest, a homeless man wheels a cart and drinks from a gin bottle, a woman on the street drinks from a small bottle of vodka, a man finds and drinks from a small bottle of gin, and several city scenes show empty liquor bottles and beer cans rolling on dirty streets. Four smoking scenes each feature one of three men or one woman smoking a cigarette, and a homeless man pulls a cigarette from a vodka bottle on the ground.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Bystander apathy, homelessness, corrupt governments, bad cops, bullying, vigilantes, taking the law into one's own hands, drugs, prostitution, poverty, justice.

MESSAGE - Evil eventually destroys itself. Vigilantism is justified to fend off apathy.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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