Repo Man

Alex Cox, USA, 1984, 92 minutes

Meet Otto (Emilio Estevez). He’s an 18-year old suburban So-Cal punker like so many others until he half-unwittingly becomes a repo man (i.e. legally sanctioned car thief), learns the repo code off old-timer Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) - apparently it’s a parody of Isaac Asimov’s "Three Laws of Robotics" - and becomes involved in the lucrative search for a Chevy Malibu stolen by one J Frank Parnell from the government’s secret base at Roswell...

One of the all-time great cult films, Alex Cox’s Repo Man’s highlights include an excellent soundtrack featuring - among others - Black Flag’s 'TV Party’, Suicidal Tendencies’ 'Institutionalised’ and the Circle of Jerks with their lounge rendition of When the Shit Hits the Fan ("I used to like these guys," laments Otto in an in-joke response). There’s also some biting satire on the religious right of a culturally dead Reaganite America (note the TV preachers peddling "Diuretics" rather than "Dianetics"), the naming of all the repo men after brands of Beer (Bud, Miller, Lite) or Parnell’s insistence that radiation is healthy - with nods to the paranoid cold-war attitudes of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove along the way. Throw in some classic Harry Dean Stanton deadpan - "The life of a repo man is always intense" - stir, and enjoy...

Review by Miichel Gentil
Written for EUFS Programme Autumn 2004