What makes a movie like Repo Man so enjoyable is that it doesn’t really take itself seriously. It’s mostly a series of episodic tales involving punk rocker degenerates, sleazy people who work for a repossession business, street gangs and America’s growing obsession with consumerism and televangelism in the 1980s.
Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez) is a ne’er do well in his late teens being fired from another thankless job at a supermarket. He’s into the punk rock scene but is down on his luck. His girlfriend dumped him during the middle of them making out to hook up with his friend. His parents, former hippies, have squandered most of their money, given it to a TV evangelist as they sit on the couch watching him like mindless zombies.
One day, he’s walking through an Los Angeles area neighborhood when a middle-aged man, Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), needs his help. Bud is a repo man and offers Otto $25 to drive a car back to their impound. Immediately disgusted that he’s working for the Man, he rethinks an offer and becomes an apprentice to Bud, who despite his appearance has the same disdain for authority. Bud snorts cocaine and swills beer even though he dresses like a police detective as a cover.
They drink beers on the job and Otto enjoys the thrill of legally taking people’s cars as they work on commission. Most of the people who work at the repo business have names related to alcoholic drinks. He also gets to meet a hot young woman, Leila (Olivia Barrish), who works for the United Fruitcake Outlet. This is actually a front for a government agency involved in recovering the stolen bodies of dead aliens, which are in a Chevrolet Malibu, driven by J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris), who used to work for the government at the Los Alamos, N.M. site where the aliens were originally located.
The aliens’ bodies emit radiation. It’s causing Parnell to slowly lose his mind as he drives aimlessly through the Southwest. When he is stopped by a patrol cop in the Mojave Desert, the cop looks in the trunk but his body is vaporized by the white glow from their bodies. (Quentin Tarantino would later use this same glow in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.)
Also, the United Fruitcake Outlet has the initials UFO. This is also a reference to suspicions and criticism that the CIA worked in tandem with the United Fruit Company to keep Central America countries from turning into communist countries. Spies Like Us had also used this as the Ace Tomato Company was a front for the Department of Defense and Defense Intelligence Agency. Incidentally, United Fruit became United Brands in 1970 but folded in August of 1984 months after Repo Man opened in March 1984.
It’s an odd little movie that seems a perfect example of the MTV generation of film-making. The youth in the movie enjoy a life of debauchery and sex. The adults (of the Baby Boom generation) seem to be high on the fact they’re in charge now. Even though the job he works is very dangerous and Otto finds himself being shot at and even beaten up, his superiors don’t care. Oly (Tom Finnegan) seems to run the business like most adults of the era who feel like God even though they have a small speck of authority. There’s also Plettschner (Richard Foronjy) who wears a police uniform yet seems to bend the knee to Oly when he’s not knitting. It’s never made clear if he’s a cop or not. He mentions to Otto he used to be a prison guard so it’s possible he worked briefly and kept the uniform so people think he’s a cop the same way Bud dresses like a police detective.
There seemed to be a growing mentality in the 1980s that youth not only needed to work their way from the bottom up, but they needed to be treated as terrible as possible. Otto’s friend, Kevin (Zander Schloss) seems to bounce around through several service jobs being treated like the whipping boy wherever he goes. Otto does find some better treatment from another repo man, Lite (Sy Richardson), but I think it’s because he’s black. There’s also Miller (Tracy Walters) who works at the repo impound as the mechanic and detail person as the others sit in the office drinking beers. Miller doesn’t drive and doesn’t have his license. But he’s an odd person who feels that aliens don’t actually exists as UFOs are really time machines.
Probably the most funny tidbit about this movie is how Michael Nesmith helped finance it and is credited as a producer. Yes, the same Michael Nesmith who was part of The Monkees and had a mother who invented liquid paper. The movie was made on a small budget of $1.5 million which even for 1984 was still a small amount. There’s an ongoing gag that all food items and household projects have a generic labeling on them with just a white background and blue stripes and the name of the product in blue lettering. This is reference to a brand of beer that used to be sold at the Ralph’s supermarkets in southern California in the 1980s. The beers make an appearance in other movies like Just One of the Guys. This leads to a hilarious joke where Otto opens up a can just labeled “FOOD” and starts eating out of it with a spoon.
And one of the movie’s main villains, Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes) is supposed to have a fake metal hand. But the movie’s budget only laid for a silver grey glove. Yet, I think it adds to the context of the movie. You can do a lot more with less. Rogersz takes herself so seriously that someone like her would try to act like she has a prosthetic.
However, they did use a lot of 3M reflective paint which cost $600 a bucket to make the Malibu glow from the radiation. For a movie like this, we don’t need a lot of overblown special effects. Sometimes, all it takes is some practical effects, good lighting and camera angles.
Regardless the movie wasn’t a big success even though critics liked it. Repo Man found a cult following mostly for its use of punk rock music with a main theme by Iggy Pop himself. Some of its jokes might not have made sense over 40 years ago as there’s references to a book called Diuretics which is a reference to Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. This book itself would become blown up in the 1980s thanks to a commercial which would run on TV.
Sadly, writer/director Alex Cox has seen his career go stalled. Repo Man opened the door for Sid and Nancy but Cox was also involved in the development hell adaptation of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to which would lead to arbitration with the Writers Guild of America over film credits. In 2009, Cox would make Repo Chick which became infamous for its cheap green-screen effects and low-budget.
Sometimes filmmakers make their best work early in their careers and never recover. Still, Repo Man remains one of the rarest movies of its time and still amazing as it wonderfully mixes genres such as comedy, satire, sci-fi and horror.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 