When I think about it literally though, taste means taste. It tickles me in all the right spots, and its music and iconic lines have been etched on my soul as clearly as my own name.
I can’t defend this movie as a commentary on anything besides what happens when producers finance a project because “fuck you is why.” I tried to rationalize my love of Repo with some chatter about camp and controlled edginess, loving the music for its brashness and the story for its message, but it’s hard to keep one’s theory of art straight when a character shoves his hand up a dead person’s chest cavity to use the corpse mouth as a puppet. “My god,” I thought as a character sang about stealing someone’s face to staple their face on top of his face, “I’m experiencing real joy right now. Liking it would have meant I had Bad Taste. Between the subject matter, the difficult music, and the bondage-goth costuming, it was easy for me to write the movie off as gross and wrong. It’s very easy to feel uncomfortable with some of the things that happen on screen - wanton murder, strong hints of incest, a lot of pelvic thrusting about drugs, bug collecting, grave robbing, inheritance law. I’d be lying if I said I loved Repo on my first watch. It wasn’t until I watched it twice, compelled to do that again with all the impulse control of a puppy smashing her face into a cactus, that Repo really clicked for me. Anthony Stewart Head from Buffy plays her dad. She sings a song about being addicted to future heroin while wearing a leather bustier and trying to fuck a man who sucks glowing blue juice out of people’s brains. All of the above information is conveyed in the first minute through comic book panels that introduce the organ failures, GeneCo, and the main characters before Repo even touches its its live-action plot, which is a funky, Rapunzel-esque riff on how parents go too far in trying to protect their children and freedom of choice is man’s paramount virtue.
Somehow, the setup of Repo is not even a tenth of its story. All of the onscreen “repossessions,” of which there are not few, are rendered with alarming, gory realism. Permanently.ĭid I mention that Repo is produced by the same company that makes the Saw movies? Right, sorry. When someone can’t pay for their shiny fake heart, the Repo Man comes and reclaims the company’s property. A company called GeneCo steps in and invents expensive artificial organs that save the human race, but the high cost of the organs causes some to fall behind on payments for their life-saving new parts. Repo, not to be confused with the Jude Law movie Repo Men (which may or may not have jacked Repo’s concept, no one could ever really figure that out in a court of law) is a sung-through goth opera set in a dystopian future where universal organ failures have decimated the human population.
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