Rutger Hauer must be a happy man, and not just because he is receiving a career award tonight on the opening night of the 27th Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival Imagine. Once drawn to America more or less on good luck, now one of the few Dutch film actors with a broad and still expanding and insanely varied international career. Blonde robot in Blade Runner, serious leading role in Black Butterflies, interpreter of Pieter Breugel in the Polish avant-garde film The Mill and the Cross, and still not too good to play the title role with verve in the brilliantly offbeat B-movie spectacle Hobo With a Shotgun Which Imagine opens with. Who can say that after him.
That opening film, by the way, could hardly have been better chosen for a festival that values creative fantasy, as well as its horror roots. Hobo With a Shotgun is an ode to the video pulp genre photographed in debauched colours. Hauer plays a vagrant who one day gets tired of begging and wants to become self-employed. However, when he is wheeled in by local crime he freaks out and starts a purge that Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver could learn a thing or two from. Since Peter Jackson's Braindead few films have been so delightfully 'over the top'.
Leo Bankersen
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