“The life of a repo man is always intense.”
Can you recommend a movie on the basis of its soundtrack album alone? Probably not, and Repo Man certainly has a lot going for it besides its background music, but damn, that soundtrack is great. Back in the mid-’80s, it seemed to be playing everywhere — well, at least in my college dorm. Wander down the halls, and you could hear the songs playing in one room after another: “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies, “Pablo Picasso” by Burning Sensations, “TV Party” by Black Flag, “When the Shit Hits the Fan” by the Circle Jerks, “Repo Man” by old man Iggy Pop… For most of us, it was our first taste (and, let’s be honest, pretty much the last) of the L.A. punk scene, far fiercer and more primal than East Coast punk (compared to these guys, the Ramones were cute and cuddly).
“I don’t want no commies in my car. No Christians, either.”
But what about the movie itself? Repo Man is a true punk film, with a screw-you attitude and a chip on its shoulder. (It’s no surprise that its director, Alex Cox, would go on to direct Sid and Nancy.) Prickly and punchy, it dares you to like it. The hero, Otto (Emilio Estevez) is kind of an asshole, and his mentor, Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) is a belligerent sociopath. The title profession is one that most people would rate somewhere between IRS auditor and grave robber in terms of popularity. Why would you want to sit through an hour-and-a-half-long movie with these bozos? Well, because it’s absolutely hilarious and bloody brilliant, that’s why.
“The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.”
Otto is suckered into taking part in a repo job by Bud, and as he needs the money (his parents have given all of his college fund to a TV preacher), he reluctantly becomes a regular, becoming adept at legal carjacking. What follows is a series of incidents as Bud, Otto, and their repo crew steal cars, get into fights (with car owners, a rival repo team, and each other), and sit around talking trash. They consider themselves above the rest of humanity (they’ve got a code!) yet seem to embody the worst of it.
“Suppose you’re thinking about a plate o’ shrimp. Suddenly someone will say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o’ shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in looking for one either.”
Wait, isn’t this supposed to be a science fiction movie? Oh, yes, there’s a mad scientist driving around in a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a couple of dead alien bodies in the trunk, so radioactive that they incinerate anyone who looks at them. A secretive government agency is trying to track them down, as is a group of scientists (one of whom briefly becomes Otto’s kinda-girlfriend). Over the course of the movie, the car gets stolen by one group after another, and several people get disintegrated. Where did the aliens come from, and why are they so destructive? The movie doesn’t particularly care, so why should me?
“Let’s go do some crimes!”
“Yeah, let’s go get sushi and not pay.”
Some of the gags are a bit dated, such as the running gag about generic products in plain white containers (here, especially generic: “Food” and “Drink”), based on a barely-remembered fad that lasted for a couple of years in the early 80s. But generally speaking, the humor holds up well. The comedy of people behaving badly never gets old. And some many of the lines are quotable, or at least were quoted, over and over, in my mid-80s dorm. It helps that the entire cast (who, aside from Estevez and Stanton, were unknowns then and remain so today) is committed to the movie’s absurdities, especially Fox Harris (who doesn’t even get a picture in the IMDB) as the mad professor, lovingly chewing up the scenery and spitting it back out again.
“Don’t go! What about our relationship?”
“Fuck that.”
But above all it’s Stanton who shines in what perhaps is his most seminal role. Roger Ebert once said that “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad,” and that’s the case here. Stanton appeared in a lot of great movies, including Wise Blood, The Godfather Part II, Alien, The Lat Temptation of Christ, Cool Hand Luke, and In the Heat of the Night, but he was never more iconic than here, playing the quintessential repo man, grumbling, “Ordinary fucking people. I hate ’em.” He’s the kind of guy you’d never want to meet in real life unless you were in an extremely tight situation, and then you’d be glad to have him on your side.
“I know a life of crime led me to this sorry fate, and yet I blame society.”
Not to sound like your grandfather, but: Repo Man is the kind of movie that wouldn’t get made these days. In this age of CGI, you’d never get away with the cheesy special effects and backlot sets. Too many cheap movies of the 21st Century come across as slick and soulless. I miss the attitude of movies like Repo Man, a movie that feels like it’s going to punch you in the face or shiv you between the ribs, but ends up gloriously entertaining you. Is there room for punk in the 2020s?
“You ever feel as if your mind had started to erode?”