I'm about to type words that I almost cannot believe I'm typing. Words that will defy logic for a moment. I'm about to tell you to see a film -- that you MUST see a film, actually. But I don't like it. Not one bit. It's called REPO! The Genetic Opera (official site), and it is quite simply one of the most specifically targeted, strangest films I have ever seen. It was carefully crafted to be an instant cult classic. And you know what? With as many films as I've seen in my life, I have never seen anything like it. And neither have you. And while I am not a member of the target audience of this film, it proves itself time and again to be a singular vision that is wholly in love with its material and looks unlike any other film out there.

And that's why you HAVE to see it. Even if its not your thing, any and every film lover needs to have this film in their cinematic vocabulary.

Films like this happen so rarely for a variety of reasons. Either the studio doesn't get it (they usually don't), or they got it and realized there's a small audience for it, that the critics will savage it, that the filmmakers just don't have the juice to get it off the ground. But for Repo! the stars aligned. Director Darren Lynn Bousman, fresh off of directing three of the Saw movies (he directed 2-4) used his pull at Lionsgate to get the funding for his dream project -- a small-stage production of a bizarre science fiction horror fantasy ... opera. Yes. It's an opera. Like I said, you've never seen anything like it.

This "rock opera/movie musical" follows a young (and incredibly beautiful) girl named Shilo (Alexa Vega, who you will remember as the little girl from the Spy Kids movies) who's caught up in a web of intrigue surrounding her dead mother's ex-lover, his sadistic and deranged family, and her own father who is secretly a repo man who recollects designer organs for Shilo's dead mother's ex-lover. Still with me? Yeah -- it's an odd duck of a film, one that you either love or just plum don't. This film sold out early shows with fans already dressing up as characters, and despite being dumped and pulled quickly due to backroom studio politics revolving around one of Lionsgate's ex-bigwigs, the film generated a lot of buzz and is finally available on disc.

Well, on disc sans a bevy of special features, unfortunately. This thing comes stripped-down with only the most vaguely special of features -- a 10-minute making-of titled "From Stage to Screen," and an even shorter doc on the film's namesake character, the Repo Man. Now, this doesn't surprise me at all. This film wants to be The Rocky Horror Picture Show with tinges of Blade Runner and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It has a built-in audience of Hot Topic shoppers that embraced it BEFORE they saw it. OF COURSE it's a stripped-down DVD. This baby is gonna be double-dipped until judgement day, with "newly discovered, never before seen" special features and deleted scenes that will delight the longtime fans and put Darren Lynn Bousman's kids through college.

And really, I can't fault them. Cult audiences are consumer audiences, so why not give them three or four or five versions of the film to buy over the course of their lives? Do I think YOU should buy it? Not right off the bat. You need to rent it, though, and see it for yourself. Who knows, you might fall head over heels for it like many others have. I wish I was among them -- I'm envious. I LOVE falling in love with films with the passion that this fan-base has already shown. But for me it was just a little too tailored, a little too weird for the sake of being weird.

Repo! The Genetic Opera is available now from Lionsgate.

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