Cinecult: Repo Man

Originally run on 9 February 2009. Image from Google.

What I like most about this column is that I can go from praising a bona fide classic film like Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo to smaller, stranger cult movies like Death Race 2000. Repo Man is definitely one of those cult movies and it is just as worthy of your time as on the Criterion Collection.

Repo Man is the first feature length film of the writer/director Alex Cox (Syd & Nancy) and focuses on commissar of the capitalist world: The repossession agent. If you filch on your car payments, the repo man is the guy who, through a number of legally gray means, will steal your car away from you. The mad world of the repo man is perfect comedic fodder for Cox who turns out a film that’s as funny as it is crazy—and in a world where traffic cops are vaporized and men in biohazard suits routinely walk around downtown LA collecting dead homeless people.

The bulk of the plot follows punk rocker and amateur repo man Otto (Emilio Estevez), who, alongside his sleazeballs-in-arms, as he searches for a mysterious Chevy Malibu which is also being tracked down by the CIA, a bunch of alien cultists and a couple of “gypsy dildo punks” by the name of the Rodriguez Brothers. Estevez is serviceable in the lead role, but the supporting characters and their semi-coherent monologues are the heart of the film.

The most memorable of the repo men is the crank-addled sensei, Bud, played by the venerable Harry Dean Stanton (Alien, Escape From New York, Kelly’s Heroes, among a dozen other worthwhile films). Stanton is one of the great character actors of the past forty years, and when you look at him its something of a surprise that the man isn’t dead. In the words of director Alex Cox, Stanton has a unique face that inhabits the area somewhere between a cowboy and a cadaver. He’s always worth watching, regardless of the actual quality of the film. He carries large segments of the film with his twisting, violent diatribes about the code of the repo man.

For good reason, Repo Man is among the most quotable movies ever made (right next to Predator and The Big Lebowski). There isn’t a scene in the movie that doesn’t deliver either a laugh or something profound (or maybe just crazy). The film also weaves gritty violence with surreal coincidences together extremely well, in a way that I can only compare with Cox’s revisionist western, Walker. Repo Man is a wonderfully crass comedy that you and your buddies in good time should be able to quote right into the grave.