In 1984, a very strange movie was released with hardly a ripple. Written and directed by Alex Cox, a first-time director straight out of UCLA film school, it involved aliens, nuclear paranoia, the L.A. punk scene, and the fine art of automobile repossession.

A young Emilio Estevez plays Otto, an L.A. punk tricked into helping Bud (played by Harry Dean Stanton) repossess a car. Fired from his job stocking supermarket shelves, Otto dumps one fringe subculture for another, leaving behind his punk crew for a new gang of repo men, guys with names like Lite and Oly and Miller, a mystic with crackpot theories about cars being time machines and the Maya inventing TV.

Otto crosses paths with a weird girl with a story about a mad scientist driving a '64 Chevy Malibu with four dead aliens in the trunk. What's really in the trunk? Aliens' corpses? An H-bomb? Who knows, but anyone who looks at it turns to dust.

When a $20,000 bounty is posted for the Malibu, the chase is on, a farce set against the backdrop of a desolate, violent Reagan-era Los Angeles, with repo men hopped up on speed and bombing through the desolate night streets in stolen cars -- outlaws who are enforcing the law, sort of. A web of increasingly unlikely coincidences follows. Otto's old punk friends end up stealing the Malibu, as do rival repo outfit the Rodriguez Bros., then the mad scientist steals it back, Otto steals it from him, and all, of course, while being chased by the CIA.

Harry Dean Stanton is perfect as the rumpled, ragged cynic with a code, dispensing wisdom ("See, an ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."). And the cartoonish punks that used to be Otto's friends say things like, "Let's go do some crimes," and "Yeah, let's go get sushi and not pay."

The movie has a vicious sense of style; in a running joke, every consumer item in the movie is generic -- white with a blue stripe and corn flakes or sliced peaches, which eventually devolves to cans marked food and drink. (They really did exist, as late as 1993 you could buy beer at Ralph's, $1.49 a six.)

Satire, send-up, on-the-fly mayhem? It's a little bit of everything, funny, surreal, self-mocking, nihilistic, trashy, and still a biting comment on the time.

When the chase finally ends, it turns out that Miller's convoluted conspiracy theories might be true after all, and you're almost willing to believe -- is the Malibu a spaceship? A time machine?

Repo Man may be best known for its soundtrack, which featured a title track from Iggy Pop and a cross-section of early '80s L.A. hardcore: Black Flag, Suicidal Tendencies, the Circle Jerks, Fear. And the score, by the Chicano punk band the Plugz, is a great mix of surf, spaghetti western, and ranchero twang that has to be heard.

A lot of Repo Man looks surprisingly good, too, especially for such a low-budget movie. The secret weapons? Believe it or not, behind the camera were Robbie Muller of Paris, Texas and Dancer in the Dark, and Bob Richardson of Platoon, Casino, and The Aviator.

But if one of the criteria for a cult movie is that it has to open to a deafening silence, Repo Man certainly fits the bill. It made less than $100,000 in its opening weekend, and was only in "wide" release -- all of thirty-nine theaters -- for a week.

But perhaps fueled by the soundtrack, passed from hand to hand on scratched cassette tapes, Repo Man became one of those movies that every kid knew about. It popped up at midnight shows around the country, and became a genuine underground classic, though it didn't make back its $1.2 million price tag until 1999 (at least "according to the studio," Cox says).

A year after Repo Man Emilio starred in The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo's Fire, and it briefly became a footnote in his career. But as all those Brat Pack movies fade into history, now it's the standout on his resume. Let's face it, no one's releasing collectors' editions of Men at Work.

Email me your fave cult movies or leave 'em in the comments, I'll watch anything once. Except Mamma Mia.

Recommend (0)

|  Comments (0)

|  Email

|  Share

Share  Facebook Digg del.icio.us