Of Gods and Men and Others on DVD This Week

Survivor Man can suck it.

On DVD this week, three movies you might not have seen or heard of, but that you definitely should. An exploitative (in all the right ways) B-movie Grindhouse urban adventurer epic - Hobo With a Shotgun. A French drama about monks massacred in North Africa in the 90's, partly inspired by a true story - Of Gods and Men. And a film about immigration, specifically how far a woman will go to protect her son - Illegal. 

This is my first post in about a week, so I won't bog you down with any sort of prolific piece about each film. Let's cut straight to the chase. You want to know which one to see, right? Of course. The correct answer to that question is all three. I always urge my readers to see anything they can get their hands on. But, sometimes money is tight and you can't rent everything in sight. Well, this is where we help you make a decision. 

And as long as that decision is Hobo With a Shotgun, you're on the right track. 

More after the cut--

Hobo With a Shotgun

Rating : ★ ★ ★

Spare your change

If you don't get the joke right away, you'll be uncomfortable for the next 90 minutes. Hobo With a Shotgun is a special kind of movie; consider the way that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre explains its purpose solely by its title. It's in Texas, and someone massacres people with a chainsaw. Hobo With a Shotgun is just that - there's a homeless man, and he has a shotgun. That's never a good combination. We've seen this plot before, though - numerous times. Part Taxi Driver, part Walking Tall, part any "old man fights back" movie, this is neo-Grindhouse in its ugliest form. Of course, Grindhouse cinema, almost by definition, isn't pretty. Shoddy production values, you'll find poorly edited reels of film with scratches on them, boom microphones hanging in the shots... (not here, though, thankfully). 

Grindhouse, by a sort of... standardized definition - low-budget filmmaking in the hands of a skilled director, made solely to mess with you. That, simply, is Hobo with a Shotgun. To drive home the Grindhouse point even more, the only reason this film exists is because of 2007's Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez Grindhouse. It comes in two parts, and has fake trailers in between each actual movie. Machete was one of them. This is one of the others. It was created by the director, Jason Eisman, for Canadian showings of their film. Amazingly, it got enough support to become a full feature film.

More after the cut--