Repo Man makes zero sense and has cannily embraced this fact, turning it into a marketing tool of sorts and something that unifies the members in its loyal cult following.
But the fact remains Repo Man makes no sense.
Otto (EmilLLIOOO! Estevez) is your standard run of the mill Los Angeles loser, he takes a job as a repo man only in the absence of other opportunities. By the way a repo man is the guy who ‘repossesses’ items – mainly cars – where the owner is late in debt payments and such. They are a much hated breed, especially in lower income areas where most of there work is done.
Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) is an experienced hand who would have written the book on being a repo man if there was one. He takes Otto under his wing and shows him the ropes, stressing that being a repo man isn’t a job but a calling. A way of life.
The other repo men are just as deranged.
In his early days on the job Otto is beaten, belittled and shot at in the line of ‘duty’, but that’s just the beginning.
One day a run of the mill car has a big fat bounty put on it – one far more than the worth of the car – a young woman tells Otto that it’s full of dead bodies. Dead Alien bodies. The driver of the car is a weirdly intense and intensely weird man.
Otto, the FBI and many other mysterious people, including repo men from competing organisations, all actively search for this car…
And in reality that’s about all I can say about Repo man without beating it with a bat. Sure it’s off-kilter, deliberately strange and almost impossible to understand, but that’s all it is. Unlike other films of its ilk Repo Man isn’t creative, amusing (intentionally or otherwise) or memorable. I watched it only a few days ago and I am buggered if I can remember anything worthwhile about it.
Not really a cult that I can be bothered getting behind.
Final Rating – 4.5 / 10. A case of curiosity value trumping common sense. Like the car with a huge bounty you wonder what’s in it, then once you learn the truth you wonder why you cared in the first place.
