The Vagrant Movie Download

4 / 10

The end of Chris Walas’s short directorial career.
Horror comedy The Vagrant is the epitome of oddball. The direction is quirky, the performances are kooky, the music is eccentric, and the plot goes off on some very strange tangents. I usually enjoy oddball, but on this occasion I found the film’s little idiosyncrasies rather annoying instead of charming, a shame because it had an intriguing premise and a pretty decent cast.

Bill Paxton plays meek yuppie Graham Krakowski, who buys a house only to find that the vacant lot opposite is home to a scary hobo (Marshall Bell) who proceeds to make Graham’s life a misery. When a series of murders rocks the neighbourhood, Graham is convinced that the vagrant is responsible, but after body parts are found in his house, he becomes the prime suspect.

For most of the film, the viewer is kept in the dark as to whether the vagrant is real or a figment of Krakowski’s imagination, and whether the yuppie is the killer himself, which keeps one watching, but things go from weird to downright bizarre as Graham flees his home to live on a trailer park (growing a mullet to fit in), hooks up with a chubby chick called Doattie (Patrika Darbo), is blamed for killing a blind man’s dog, and hits the road again, all the while pursued by a hard-bitten cop, Lt. Ralf Barfuss (Michael Ironside). A twist towards the end explains exactly why the dirty old tramp does what he does.

With make-up FX man Chris Walas in the director’s chair, one can expect some decent gore–there’s a severed head and feet, which are found in Graham’s fridge, a character is impaled on chair legs, and the vagrant’s demise features ruptured eyeballs–plus there’s a modicum of nudity in a dream sequence that sees the bum boffing Krakowski’s girlfriend Edie (Mitzi Kapture).

To Walas’s credit, his film is never boring and also fairly unpredictable, but with such a strange approach taken by all involved, I believe this to be very much a ‘Marmite’ movie, and I’ve never liked Marmite.

3.5/10, rounded up to 4 ‘cos I’m feeling generous (Walas did create the Gremlins, after all!).Read More