Cleanin' the Streets

Hobo with a Shotgun (2011)
Dir - Jason Eisener
Special Dungeon Screening!

Started out as a fake trailer in the Grindhouse faux-trailer contest this awesome premise has been fleshed out into a full feature with the great Rutger Hauer in the lead role. Who wouldn't want to see this based on the red band trailer alone? I held out to hopefully see this in a theater instead of renting it on-demand and I'm glad I did because The Texas Theatre started playing it this week. Now I could have seen it in their 600+ seat main theatre like everyone else but they were having one screening in their "super secret" dungeon screening room. Something I (along with Jenny, Micah and Melissa) could not pass up doing.

First to get to the basement screening room you have to go through the men's restroom! Once in the small door you go down a small staircase into the room that's small and dank. When I say dank... I mean dank. There are plumbing pipes hanging down with cut tennis balls on the ends of the sharper/lower ones so you don't hit your head. It seats around 16 or so, but due to all the recent rain we were down a few seats because of the standing water in the back corner. Ha! One of the theater owners was even down there mopping as our pre-show entertainment.

             

As for the projection there was a small projector, like you would find in someone's home theater, hooked to a PS3 and a PA system. I worried for about a half a second about the water leaving the confines of the  orange cones and electrocuting something but that might make it even more fun. Luckily the sound was loud enough that I never heard a toilet flush once the movie started. The whole thing is thrown on a "screen" that's sloppily hung on the wall. Interesting.

The chairs were small and damn uncomfortable, as well as how hot it was down there. If they got a fan down there and let you bring your own lawn chars, or something similar, it might be fun to do semi-regularly for some dark horror, underground (natch) or exploitation fare. It's quite an experience, one that makes you feel like your in a room with a bunch of perverts watching a snuff film or something. But in a good way of course! Hopefully they'll figure out the cooling situation before next time and I'll go back down there, but probably not otherwise.

As for the actual film - I thought it really delivered. Some great ultra-violence and a fun story. I really love The Plague and some of the more humorous one-liners. Eisener made a good decision to keep the comedy to a minimum and go a more serious route with the film. Karim Hussain's cinematography was quite interesting and really hit the nail on the head with some of the films of the exploitation heyday. Films like Bitch Slap should really take note of what is done here, because this is the right way to make this kind of retro-sploitation.