“An ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations - a repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.”

Plot Summary: Repo man Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) initiates young punk Otto (Emilio Estevez) into the wacky world of car repossession.

Review:

One of the most charming japes of this one-of-a-kind cult classic is that the antisocial punks, including Otto, are, ironically, the film’s most “normal” characters. Among the assortment of oddballs populating Cox’s surreal vision of modern L.A.’s lunatic fringe are burned-out ex-hippies, members of a secret alien conspiracy sect, a lobotomized mad scientist, a torture-happy, metal-handed female CIA agent, and several wacky repo men, including Miller, the resident philosopher king who dispenses pearls of wisdom like “the more you drive the less intelligent you are.” Most of these characters are searching for a mysterious Malibu whose trunk contains some glowing extraterrestrial substance that instantly vaporizes anyone who looks at it (a reference to the deadly container of nuclear material in Kiss Me Deadly). As with any film so determinedly offbeat, Repo Man occasionally lapses into tiresome, self-conscious jokiness, but this deficiency is more than made up for by its gallery of memorably addled characters, its consistently amusing, off-kilter dialogue (I love when Estevez tries to prove he’s a good catch by telling a girl he likes, “stick with me, I’ll make you a repo wife”) and its endearing flights of fancy like when Miller and Otto take the green glowing Malibu for a little spin - into outer space! I suspect that scene planted a kernel in Zemeckis’s mind for the following year’s Back to the Future.    

Posted on March 10th, 2008 by Mat Viola
Filed under: Reviews