Rating: B-
Dir: Macon Blair.
Star: Peter Dinklage, Jacob Tremblay, Taylour Paige, Kevin Bacon.
After the abortion which was the Street Trash remake, you’ll understand my concerns about another unnecessary update of an eighties splatter classic. Especially given the struggles this had on its way to the screen: over four years passed between shooting and the film finally getting a wide release. To my surprise, this is fine. It’s major crime is occasionally being too obvious, but subtlety was never exactly going to be a strong suit here. Blair clearly loves the original, and while the budget here is at least an order of magnitude higher than it was, it has a similar spirit. Though going by the dismal box-office returns, those who deemed it “unreleasable” weren’t exactly wrong.
This feels very much cut from the same cloth as Hobo With a Shotgun. A downtrodden town – St. Roma’s Ville, a nice nod to Tromaville – under the heel of ruthless and violent overlords. But sometimes, the hero you need can be found in the least likely of places. Here, it’s mild-mannered janitor, Winston Gooze (Dinklage), who is dumped in toxic waste by the minions of sleazy tycoon, Bob Garbinger (Bacon). He emerges still short, now played in costume by Luisa Guerreiro. But he’s buff, bulletproof and with a lethal mop that can knock off your face. When Garbinger captures Winston’s stepson Wade (Tremblay), hoping to unlock the DNA key to the transformation, Toxie teams up with whistleblower J.J. Doherty (Paige) to bring down the evil corporation.
Dinklage is great, as you’d expect, and the humanity he brings to Winston is a clear improvement on the original. He gets diagnosed with a brain tumour, and the cut from that to him yelling repeatedly into a phone, “Talk to an agent!” as he tries to negotiate with his health insurance provider is… Well, it’s funny, though is also an example of what I said earlier, about being too on the nose. We don’t really need another discussion of health-care iniquities. The original was too busy running over kids, killing guide dogs and making fun of the gays for that shit. Once Winston transforms, though Dinklage is still doing the voice, there isn’t much genuine sense of character left to find.
However, it remains goofily fun, with a lot of memorable, larger than life characters. There’s an unrecognizable Elijah Wood, and Bacon is particularly entertaining as the villain, who ends up going through quite the transformation of his own. There is also a laudable commitment from Blair largely to use practical effects, and this absolutely does not stint on the gore. It absolutely does stint on the gratuitous nudity. But such is “exploitation” cinema these days, and it’s another area in which Hobo is clearly superior. Bonus points for unexpected ABC showing up in the soundtrack during the end credits, and the (inevitable!) Lloyd Kaufman cameo. I doubt this will have anything like the staying power of the original, and indeed already seems mostly forgotten. Yet this is not, by any means, an embarrassment.