Movie Night #105: Repo the Genetic Opera
Movie Night #105: Repo The Genetic Opera (2008)
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Cast: Anthony Stewart Head, Alexa Vega, Paul Sorvino, Sarah Brightman, Paris Hilton, Ogre
Plot: Shilo Wallace (Vega) is a 17 year old girl living in a world where people can get new organs on loan from an corporation that has a rather strict repossession clause. If you don’t keep up on your payments, then they send the Repo Man (Head) after you to collect their property. However, the Repo Man is also Shilo’s guardian, and is trying to keep her from getting sick if she goes outside for fear that she may need a new set of organs eventually. The movie is filled with some catchy tunes, some killer goth production designs (like Bladerunner with corsets and lots of eye make up), and a pretty standard opera plot (which in no way implies bad – just tragic).
The flick’s a pretty fun watch, but also a long one. With the movie coming in around 2.5 hours (and a director’s cut on blu-ray with an additional 40 minutes of footage), be ready for a long and dark ride through a world that shares very different morals from our own. However, the imagination put into the flick is refreshing. I’ve heard the movie referred to as the modern generation’s Rocky Horror Picture Show (and while I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment, it’s close enough). It certainly has songs that people will be singing along to in their car – songs dealing with internal organ removal and taking drugs because you’re addiction to surgeries.
Also, the part where Paris Hilton’s face falls off is hilarious!
The stand out for me was three-fold:
1) Alexa Vega (best known for her performance in Spy Kids) has a voice that shines through anything else in this movie, and has grown up to become a very talented actress in her own right.
2) Someone needs to cast Anthony Stewart Head as a psychotic killer in a horror movie, because that guy is frightening! His singing didn’t shine through as much as I thought it would (though he has some range), but he’s terrifying with his hair wet while wearing leather garments and covered in blood.
3) Sarah Brightman is a damn hot goth! I had never thought that I would ever see her (a female Christian opera singer) running around with enough eye makeup to last a regular girl a year and a penetrating gaze with her creepy contacts (see the image above to see her standing along side Alexa Vega).
The reason that I don’t think it’s fair to call this movie the modern “Rocky Horror Picture Show” is that I feel like this movie may be a little less accessible to wider audiences. It’s very much inspired by a hard-core goth culture which may turn off a lot of conversative viewers. I certainly think that it will become a cult classic, but I don’t know that they’ll be playing it every year at Halloween at midnight at my local theater. However, a Rocky Horror / Repo double feature could make for a fun night!
