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When violence fills the street, there's only one law: his.
—voiceover from Hobo with a Shotgun

The competition was fierce. How could it be otherwise when some of the 300 mini movies you're up against have titles like Cannibal Hookers From Hollywood, Load Bearing Stud and Too Dead to Die?

But two Canadian cineastes blasted 'em all away to win the South By Southwest (SXSW) International Grindhouse Trailer Competition in Austin, Tex., with Hobo with a Shotgun , a one-minute, 58-second masterpiece of double-barrelled mayhem and goofball machismo. ("I want that hobo's head on my wall tonight.")

And the top prize was?

Well, "mostly bragging rights," according to Rob Cotterill, the 34-year-old Haligonian who produced and co-wrote Hobo with his buddy, director Jason Eisener, 24. The whole thing cost them maybe $150, with most of that going toward "videotape, pizza and smokes."

But what bragging rights! The competition was announced barely a month ago on the superhip website aintitcool.com as a sort of cheapo-cheapo promotional vehicle for the movie Grindhouse. Opening commercially next month, it's the much-anticipated collaboration of two of the world's foremost practitioners of the gore-action-comedy "genre," Quentin ( Pulp Fiction) Tarantino and Robert ( Desperado) Rodriguez.

The film's title refers to those seedy seventies-era cinemas that would screen a non-stop flow of Grade B sexploitation, blaxploitation, slasher and zombie films, interspersed with lurid trailers for more of the same.

Grindhouse (the movie) attempts a sort of homage to grindhouse (the experience) in that it features two films, Planet Terror, written and directed by Tarantino, and Death Proof by Rodriguez, bridged by a mess of trailers for non-existent films ( Werewolf Women of the SS and Machete among them).

Rodriguez, who lives in Texas and attended film school in Austin, concocted the trailer contest for this year's SXSW music-and-film festival as a way to let wannabe auteurs like Cotterill and Eisener in on the fun. "The only rule we were given was it had to be two minutes or less," said Cotterill.

The duo began shooting Hobo with a Shotgun the very day the competition was announced, and kept at it for the next five days, usually working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night. Luckily, Cotterill, who has been a first assistant director with Trailer Park Boys for the last two years, and Eisener, who works days in a Halifax comic-book shop, are big fans of the "xploitation" genre, and had already been batting around ideas for a feature called, yes, Hobo with a Shotgun.

"We shot, like, hours and hours of stuff" for the trailer, "and got maybe 15 minutes of awesome material," Eisener observed. "We could do at least two more trailers with what we got. It was heart-breaking to cut it out."

Eisener, in fact, has been making his own movies since he was 15, "all of them pretty much in the horror-action-comedy genre," and in 2005, one of his longer works, the 45-minute The Teeth Beneath, was screened at the Atlantic Film Festival.

Budget-wise, he's a proud do-it-yourselfer, usually relying on friends and acquaintances to function as cast and crew. "I've never gone out and looked for money," he confessed this week. "What I've been doing has been kind of like my own film school. It's the way I'd rather do it. I don't want to get a million dollars, y'know, and, like, screw up. This way, everything I do is for practice."

There's talk that the Eisener-Cotterill mini saga could end up on the DVD of G rindhouse. In the meantime, though, the pair are seriously thinking of making a full-fledged version of Hobo with a Shotgun.

"We've been working on a treatment for at least a week and a half," Eisener said.