A hobo (Rutger Hauer) has been riding the freight trains looking for a town to stay, but once he reaches the end of the line he finds himself in Hope Town, a place he soon discovers is known by the alternative name of Fuck Town. He also discovers why: this area is populated by the lowest of the low, both morally and financially, and he as he wanders the streets he is accosted by a man with a video camera wanting to film him fighting, but worse than that is when he witnesses an impromptu public execution...
Time was when exploitation movies would be made based on the poster - they'd come up with the lurid artwork first, then go into production and if that promised more than the filmmakers could ever hope to live up to, at least the punters would be conned into paying to see it. However, once Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse arrived, featuring as it did fake trailers, many decided they enjoyed those two minute bursts of action better than the movies themselves. Rodriguez adapted his Machete into a full length effort, which also inspired this.
Tarantino and Rodriguez had welcomed a selection of fake trailers to be shown with their contrived double bill/tribute, and contest winner Hobo with a Shotgun was one of those. Director Jason Eisener crafted a two minute short that was packed with violence, something the subesequent expanded version could not possibly hope to live up to, although you couldn't fault them for trying. Trying too hard, as it turned out, for there may have been plenty of bloodletting, yet there was a paltry amount of plot to go round, leaving a trash sensibility less informed by drive-in classics and more by the cheapo aesthetic of Troma.
If this was one step up the ladder from bargain basement outfits like that, it was more to do with the presence of Hauer, here illustrating his anything goes approach to many of his films and lifting what could have been simply mean-minded to a slightly more ethical level. This could be seen, at a stretch, as an attempt at awarding the homeless with a shade more dignity than those higher up society would be prepared to do, if turning into a mass-murdering vigilante could be counted along those lines. See the bit where the makers of the dubious Bumfights videos get a taste of their own medicine as an example of the empowerment fantasy going on.
This was a Canadian production, which presumably was why we got star of cult sci-fi series Lexx Brian Downey chewing the scenery as the evil gang boss who runs the town instead of, say, Gary Busey. His character has two reprehensible sons who terrorise the area, and the hobo is among those victimised when he goes to the cops only to find they are just as corrupt, so he has little option but to team up with a smart prostitute, Abby (Molly Dunsworth), get himself the shotgun of the title and start blowing away the baddies. Yet even with this proactive approach to cleaning up the town, there's not much sense of victory, not with an ending like that anyway, probably because the hobo didn't seem to be doing much good; the idea that humanity is growing so sick to the soul that only gun violence will help wasn't exactly constructive, and nor should it have been, but Eisener and his writers injected a would-be social conscience into this which never quite clicked with the outrageousness.
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