HobokenHollow

Hoboken Hollow (2005)

In an isolated and lonely stretch of Texas there lives a family that with the help of a few friends grabs drifters and illegal immigrants to work their ranch as slave labor. They are put to harvesting cedar, mending fences, and pretty much anything else that will make the family money. When they refuse or can’t work anymore they are tortured and turned into jerky. There is also a strange bit with a local rancher that wants to take their land for some water rights that will make him rich. Into all of this stumbles a former Army ranger running away from a bad battlefield experience.

I’m not even sure where I should begin with this review. There is something really off about this movie that I find hard to describe, and not in a good way. The story is very familiar, but is presented here with a few interesting twists. The family here isn’t crazy in a I’m just going to kill you sort of way. No they are simply looking for some free labor and only get nuts when you aren’t useful anymore. So that is an interesting twist that I haven’t seen in a movie like this before. But the movie is just such a mess.

First off there are too many characters in this thing. You have several different victims that aren’t ever really defined. This makes their eventual fates not interesting, plus there are so many of them that it gets hard to follow who is who. I seriously couldn’t keep track of who they already killed. In addition to the victims the subplot about the local rancher trying to purchase their land is rather pointless and slows the movie down. I understand that this plays into the ending and gives the filmmaker an opportunity to cast Michael Madsen and Greg Evigan in what are basically just bit parts (and in the case of Evigan almost a cameo). But the subplot just muddles things up. They also have a small subplot with the man who buys their cedar that is an excuse to put Robert Carradine in the movie. But the most egregious bit of this is adding a very small role of a sheriff so they can have Dennis Hopper make an appearance. As if I already didn’t thing they were trying to be a Chainsaw rip-off. While I didn’t find the main plot to be that interesting or strong, adding all these subplots only made things more confusing. This is a movie with far too many characters.

This brings me to my second issue with Hoboken Hollow. It starts off with a very “Dukes of Hazzard” type of voiceover that introduces the characters. How lazy can you be as a filmmaker that you have to quickly run down everyone that is in the movie? I was immediately put off by this, and it also plays into me not knowing who the characters were, which I’ve already mentioned. It also feels like the kind of movie that they either ran out of time or money to finish. It just sort of ends without any resolution. I mean we do get the voiceover again, which disappears after about 15 minutes of the movie only to fill the audience in on what happened at the end. I just felt like this was a big cheat. If you are going to set up all these overly complicated and ambitious plots and subplots then you have better give the audience some on screen resolution.

The final thing that I wanted to say is that the movie teases the audience with the idea that it might kick up the gore and violence. But nothing all that special happens on screen. You get some stuff with a cattle prod and a couple of latex limbs lying about, but that is pretty much all there is. I’ve seen much more disturbing effects and visuals on network television. There isn’t much else to say about this, other then I kept waiting for it to get “good” and it never did.

For the life of me I can’t explain how writer/director Glen Stephens managed to assemble such a good cast for a movie that clearly was made by an amateur. The direction, editing, and writing screams out that it was done by someone who didn’t understand how to make a movie. The fact that good money was spent on this is a real drag. The only positive that I can find about this is that the website for Mr. Stephens production company has lapsed and he hasn’t been credited with another movie since this one 5 years ago. Don’t be fooled by the great cast this is a turkey.

½ out of 4

reviewed by John Shatzer