In Revue: Sleaze, Stupidity and Twin Lesbian Yodellers

By John Semley

Because Toronto’s more movie obsessed than a Quentin Tarantino screenplay (yuk yuk), Torontoist brings you In Revue, a weekly roundup of new releases.

Rutger Hauer drives sleazy, and you’re riding shotgun. Illustration by Chloe Cushman/Torontoist.

Look at all these movies in theatres this week. Brand new. Perfect. People look at these trailers and think of how bright their futures will be. They want them to be something special. Citizen Kane. Or Jaws. Well, we hate to tell you this, but if you go the movies this week, you’re more likely to see some mediocre documentary about two yodelling Kiwi folk singers or watch a hopelessly stupid Zack Snyder fantasy adventure. Or maybe, you’ll be like us, and end up really loving one of most exciting Canadian features of the past ten years, Hobo With A Shotgun.

Make no mistake: Hobo With A Shotgun is a major film. It’s sleazy, tasteless, and unblinkingly nasty. And besides being an astonishing first feature from Halifax’s Jason Eisener (who spun the film off from a fake trailer originally attached to Canadian screenings of the 2007 Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature Grindhouse), it’s easily the most exciting Canadian feature to receive government subsidy since Mike Dowse’s FUBAR. While Hobo is savagely funny throughout, seeing those tell-tale Film Nova Scotia and Telefilm Canada emblems plastered on the screen over so much blood, entrails, and dusted up coke is the film’s punchiest gag.
A pitiless ode to the trashiest of trash cinema, Eisener’s film rubs shoulders with similar neo-exploitation outings, like Rodriguez’s Machete (another Grindhouse byproduct) or Drive Angry 3D. And like these films, Hobo hits theatres tripped up by the various snares of exploitation revivalism: specifically, how to seem old despite obviously being new, how to exude the charm of a found piece of cinematic refuse while hitting a whole bunch of screens in wide release, and how to tactfully mete out homages to forerunning films and genres while also delivering its own unique set of pleasures. Of all the entrants into this reinvigorated C-movie canon, Hobo grapples with these unruly problems with a boldness rivalling Ti West’s 2009 ode to satanic panic cinema, House of the Devil.
Rutger Hauer (Soldier of Orange, Blade Runner) plays the titular vagrant who rolls into a crime-stricken town and, after witnessing scene after scene of brutality, resolves to bear arms against the sadistic racketeer running the show (Beachcombers vet Brian Downey). Teaming up, of course, with a wily streetwalker (Molly Dunsworth), Hauer’s violently vigilant Man with No Name begins dealing out street justice (“one shell at a time”) to the pimps, provocateurs, and crooked cops (commanded by former Nova Scotia NDP leader-cum-actor Jeremy Akerman) prowling the city.
It’s easy enough to index the influences that come to bear on Hobo With A Shotgun—basically, Death Wish 3-ish cartoon vigilantism strained through the stinky cheesecloth of a Slime City-styled vision of extreme urban squalor, splatstick gore and Trailer Park Boys regional accents. But the film is exceptional in just how comfortably it situates itself amongst its antecedents, instead of sanctimoniously hovering above them. There’s no limit to the film’s decadent vulgarity. Necks are slashed with hockey skates, babies are burned alive, innocents are strung up like meaty piñatas and beaten with baseball bats. Bug-eyed users literally mash bags of cocaine into their sneering faces. Of course it’s all in very poor taste, but its gross excesses excite, igniting the memories of what dangerous cinema looked like when you were eleven.
And it’s just as exciting revelling in Eisener’s bad-mannered experiment, watching with gnarly glee as he earns his film’s hard-R rating (and then some). It’s thrilling following him along as he mashes limbs, lobs off heads, and makes his principal, a respected Dutch thespian and humanitarian, chew prop glass. It’s tempting to hail him as some up-and-coming lowbrow Canuck auteur, were it not for the fact that he handles his debut so slickly that he seems to arrive fully formed.
Hobo With A Shotgun opens Friday, March 25, in wide release. Click here for showtimes.

Jools and Lynda Topp are the variety act defined. For decades, the openly gay twin sisters have entertained audiences in New Zealand, performing at comedy clubs and agricultural fairs, doing everything from folk music to character-based comedy, making them both the original Tegan and Sara and the original Flight of the Conchords. They are as curious as they are popular (Untouchable Girls shattered box office records when it premiered in their native New Zealand in 2009), and it’s this air of curiosity that sustains Pooley’s documentary.
Because after all—as someone notes early in the film—on paper, yodelling lesbian twins who cross-dress as cattle ranchers and sing folks songs about graffiti (though not all at once) doesn’t necessarily seem like top shelf entertainment. But the Topp Twins stuck. Untouchable Girls makes little attempt to account for the duo’s popularity. Though it does posit the idea that their appeal probably derived from their mix of rural cowgirl charm and outsider status, and consider how their rotating cast of characters created a sense of inclusiveness, Untouchable Girls mostly takes their remarkable fame for granted.
It’s hard to predict how a film like this will play with crowds unfamiliar with the Topps. And even if their comedy seems a little, well, not funny, there’s an unmistakable irrepressibility they exude that’s hard not to enjoy. And even if it’s hard to get over the Topps being so popular on the other side of the globe—how can the appeal of politically-infused yodel folk rock be so broad?—we’d probably do well to consider just how well Duct Tape Forever would be received in Auckland.
Untouchable Girls opened Thursday, March 24 for a limited engagement at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West) for showtimes.

A spellbinding journey into the heart of Zack Snyder’s dick, Sucker Punch is a sloppy, incoherent, green-screened blockbuster that might as well mark the new nadir of Hollywood filmmaking (roll over, Marmaduke).
Set in an ersatz, super-gloomy version of 1950s Vermont, Sucker Punch mines The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and the entire X-Box back catalogue for its story of Baby Doll (Emily Browning), a twenty-year-old girl abandoned in a mental hospital, booked for a lobotomy. Dreaming of escape, she crafts an elaborate in-house fantasy world where she’s actually an orphan living in a bordello. There, Baby Doll teams up with a veritable nudie cutie deck of one-dimensional wank fantasies—Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Rocket (Jena Malone) and Amber (Jamie Chung)—to hatch an escape plan. In lite-Role Playing Game fashion, Baby Doll and her party are sent on a series of fetch-quests to retrieve key items that will aid their flight. To secure these plot points, the girls enter other, deeper domains of CGI’d fantasy, aggrandizing their more banal real-world task: stealing a lighter from one of the cathouse’s horny regulars becomes storming a castle to steal fire from a dragon.
Clearly these action/adventure scenarios are what interests Snyder the most, which may explain why the superfluous levels of framing he establishes just to get to them are so dense and unconvincing. The world of Sucker Punch is so relentlessly stylized and garishly sexed up that it’s impossible to care about. The action scenes are crushed under their sheer frenzy of activity, and the threat of real danger never seems to approach our gaggle of powered-up pin-up girls, even when it does. There’s also a whole lot of bad voiceover about protectors and demons and where your angel is and stuff that never comes close to making sense.
Sucker Punch is Snyder’s first attempt to direct an original screenplay, which he co-wrote, unburdening him from the concerns of fealty that have anchored his better work (his excellent remake of Dawn of the Dead, his okay take on Watchmen). Without loyalty to a source text, Snyder is loyal only to himself. And Snyder Raw is mean, stupid, and ugly—all speed-ramping, fishnets, and energy drink headaches.
Sucker Punch opens Friday, March 25 in wide release. Click here for showtimes. But like really, who cares?