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Movie: Repo Man

Date: 1984

Category: Weird

Director: Alex Cox

Big Stars: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton, Olivia Barash

Alex Cox's directorial debut is a wickedly funny and willfully bizarre story that became a major cult item once it began making the art-house rounds a year after its release. One of the first movies to show punks onscreen as nihilistic heros and detail a seemingly normal, but bizaare and multi-connected world of indutrial wasteland L.A.

Having lost his job and his girlfriend, punk rocker Otto (Estevez) meets a guy named Bud ( Stanton) who offers him $25 to drive his wife's car out of a "bad area." When a handful of angry people start chasing Otto, he realizes that something is up, and he discovers that Bud repossesses cars for a living. With few immediate prospects, Otto joins Bud at the repo yard and is soon "ripping" cars with the best of them. When an anonymous source posts a $20,000 reward for a missing 1964 Chevy Malibu, it turns out that what's valuable isn't the car itself, but what's in the trunk, which is very hot, glows brightly, and kills anyone who comes in contact with it. A vaguely surreal modern-noir science-fiction comedy), Repo Man is packed with more incongruous sight gags than most can absorb in one viewing. Keep your eyes peeled for the air fresheners, the generic newspaper box, the mayorial campaign, the watches without hands and the plate of shrimp. It all connects and the attention to weird detail add to the comedy. The plot skewers just many people---scientologists, the punks, John Wayne---as well as the consumerism of the 1980's. Iggy Pop wrote and performed the theme song and The Circle Jerks appear as a lounge band in one of the best soundtracks of the 1980's. Part Science fiction, part satire, part work comedy, all indie fun.

Repo Man was produced by Monkee's Michael Nesmith. Alex Cox, who wrote and directed Repo Man, went on to write and direct Sid and Nancy and the even stranger Walker.