Repo Man

This week, I’m featuring a movie you might have missed suggested by a Q 90.1 listener. 1984’s Repo Man was recommended by David Schall who describes it as “a great, weird punk rock comedy/film noir.” David’s description sounds like a strange, unlikely amalgamation of elements, and it’s perfectly accurate. Repo Man is stone cold weird, but in this fizzy, prickly way that’s engaging and entertaining rather than off-putting. The film is an independent filmmaking legend, made on a tiny budget in the rougher parts of Los Angeles with mostly no-name and B-list actors and crew by Alex Cox, a young writer/director who was just barely out of UCLA’s film program. The soundtrack is a who’s who of mid-eighties punk perfection, and the film as a whole has a critical and cultural reputation that has far outlived its low-budget roots. 

 Set in a grimy, unglamorous, working-class Los Angeles, Repo Man centers on Otto, played by a very young Emelio Estevez. Otto is a spiky-haired grocery store stock boy with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Sierra Nevadas. Estevez’s insolent glower is perfect for Otto’s distain for his boss, his parents, his cheating ex-girlfriend, and the world in general. When he loses his job at the grocery store, he accidentally gets roped into helping a repo man take someone’s car back to the impound lot. Figuring he doesn’t have many other options, Otto decides to become a repo man himself and begins wearing a white shirt and tie as he goes about reclaiming cars from owners who are behind on their payments. He gets shot at, beat up, and has long periods of trolling the hot, smoggy streets with more experienced repo men and hearing about their life philosophies.

Things get interesting when Otto finds out that there is a 1964 Chevy Malibu out there somewhere with a twenty thousand dollar reward attached to it. The movie actually begins with this same car being pulled over in the Mojave desert by a motorcycle cop and when he has the driver pop the trunk so he can check it out, the officer is instantly reduced to a smoking pair of boots on the side of the road. The idea is that there are radioactive aliens stashed in the trunk of the car and everyone from the government to televangelists want to get ahold of them, hence the huge reward for whoever can track the increasingly hot and irradiated car down.

The film has moments that are laugh out loud funny, absurd, violent, philosophical, and even poetic. The cinematography is surprisingly painterly and beautiful but some of the special effects look like they were achieved with tin foil and chewing gum. But despite all of this strange mashing together of tone, subject matter, and approach, Repo Man is unified. It’s not like anything else, but it is wholly itself.

The story reaches its climax when the car is finally tracked down and everybody – the repo men, government agents, cops, and religious zealots – converge on a dark LA street to see who is going to claim it. By this time, the radiation from whatever’s in the trunk has enveloped the whole car and it is literally glowing a ghostly green. Cox and his crew achieved the lurid effect by painting the entire car with reflective street sign paint. At six hundred dollars a gallon, it cost thousands to make the car glow, but it’s so spooky and grimy-looking, it’s one of the most effective and most memorable moments in the entire film.

As one of the only people who can approach the car without bursting into flame, Otto gets in and finally finds a way out of his dead-end life and the violent, grubby world he lives in. I won’t reveal exactly how the film ends because I think you should see it for yourself. Repo Man is unique and fun. See it if you dare, punk.