“Flesh is weak. Blood is cheap.”
There is so, so much about Repo! The Genetic Opera that could turn viewers off (which explains its abysmal performance at the box office). There’s the comic-book interludes, the singing, the gore, the Paris Hilton, the sometimes overly serious satire – and you know what? These are all valid complaints. Repo! is so insanely stylized that it will either work for you or it really won’t (it reminds me of the Crank series in this regard), and it just happened to mostly work for me.
Repo! takes place in 2056, after an “epidemic of organ failure” has led to surgery becoming more and more popular. GeneCo is the world’s largest supplier of organs, offering payment plans for those who can’t afford new guts – the twist being, if you can’t pay, the organ gets forcibly extracted from your body. The film conveys all of this in a seriously cool comic-book prologue that reminds one of Heavy Metal or of Metallica’s brilliant music video for “All Nightmare Long.” The Repo Man is a monstrous, effective boogeyman, clad in leather and a boxy helmet with shining blue eyes. But beyond a visual standpoint, the Repo Man works because so much of horror is about taking something – your life, your mind, your agency, and so on. Repo! just takes that to its logical, gruesome extreme.
Director Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, III, and IV) offers us several entry points into the world of Repo! There’s Shilo (Spy Kids‘ Alexa PenaVega, billed as Alexa Vega), a seventeen-year-old who has a blood disease that forces her to stay inside (even though she goes outside in almost every single scene). There’s the terrifically-named Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), the head of GeneCo and the father of three horrible children. And there’s the white-faced ghoul billed only as Graverobber (Terrance Zdunich, who co-wrote the screenplay and the stage play it’s based on, and also co-wrote the songs). All these characters, especially Graverobber, are hit and miss, but it’s a testament to Bousman’s ambition that with his massive cast, he seems intent on making an actual, y’know, opera.
And here, I feel, there is a distinction that should be made: Repo! The Genetic Opera is not a musical. People don’t talk and then wind up singing the way they do in Sweeney Todd or Little Shop of Horrors. Nearly all of the dialogue is sung, and just like in an opera, it can be hard to tell when one song segues into another (counting instrumental tracks, Zdunich and Darren Smith composed 58 songs for the film). It can be off-putting, especially in Zdunich’s first song, “Genetic Repo Man.” It’s not a bad song, strictly speaking, but it comes right after the entrancing comic-book opening, which is a jarring way to remind you that the gimmick of Repo! is not its visuals but its music (the visuals aren’t great, as a matter of fact; it was a poor decision on Bousman’s part to try to recreate a Blade Runner landscape of urban decay on an $8.5 million budget, and the gauzy cinematography by Joseph White renders some images obscure and hard to read).
The songs, like the rest of the film, will be pretty polarizing. Some of the cast seems uncomfortable with the sheer volume of singing required of them, namely Sorvino, who is stiff and formal in the beginning, but, to his credit, seems to relax when given the chance to show off his voice with more traditionally operatic material. Repo! is best served when it takes a more classical approach to its material; some of the songs sound like Mechanical Animals-era Marilyn Manson and haven’t aged well. Bousman does himself, and the film, a favor by staging the numbers like stage productions and not film scenes. Everyone in the cast gets a nice moment. PenaVega has a lot of fun with the Runaways-inspired punk tune “Seventeen,” and Zdunich’s finest moment as Graverobber comes in “Zydrate Anatomy,” which boasts a fun call-and-response structure that makes him out to be a kind of industrial goth version of The Music Man‘s Harold Hill.
The performances, like the songs, are scattered. PenaVega does fine work, but the film can’t decide whether it wants to sexualize her (there are several scenes where she isn’t wearing pants) or make her into an innocent waif, which produces some cognitive dissonance. The Largo siblings are more of a mixed bag. Bill Moseley plays Luigi Largo as an even more id-driven Patrick Bateman, and Repo! frequently has him randomly stab people as a punchline. Kevin “ohGr” Ogilvie (billed as Ogre) aims for WTF as Pavi Largo, but the character never lands as the gruesome villain he’s supposed to be, despite the fact that he wears another face hooked onto his own.
Weirdly enough, it’s Paris Hiton, as the surgery-addicted Amber Sweet, who does the best job of all the siblings. This might sound hyperbolic, but her perennial tabloid presence (which was even higher in 2008, when Repo! was released, than it is now) gives her a kind of magnetism. As the most famous person in the cast, it’s hard to take your eyes off of her, and she acquits herself nicely, basically playing Paris Hilton as Jessica Rabbit by way of Nancy Spungen. Maybe that makes the performance sound more layered than it is, but she’s a lot of fun to watch. It’s a surprisingly vanity-free performance as well; when Amber Sweet takes the stage to sing, her face comes peeling off of her head. (The Largo kids are surprisingly timely, in that they remind me of the Trumps. Luigi is Donald Trump Jr., in love with his power and the outlet it offers him for his sadism [that’s not libel; Donald Trump Jr. hunts big game]. Pavi is Eric Trump, who has an, um, interesting face. And Amber Sweet is Ivanka, the pretty face of the company.) Stage actress Sarah Brightman (who originated the role of Christine in The Phantom of the Opera) doesn’t get a ton to do as Blind Mag, but she has a huge amount of presence, and gets a fun number with PenaVega in “Chase the Morning.”
There is one truly standout performance in Repo! and that is Anthony Stewart Head as Nathan, Shilo’s father. Head – who, unsurprisingly, has a musical background, having appeared on stage in Godspell and Rocky Horror Picture Show – finds the doting father and the sadistic Repo Man in Nathan, and manages to reconcile the two. His two numbers are the film’s best. First there’s “Thankless Job,” in which he flounces around, growling about his work to a man who is about to undergo involuntary surgery. Later, in his dying moments, he and PenaVega duet on “I Didn’t Know I’d Love You So Much,” bringing this crazy, gory film its one moment of grace.
Repo! The Genetic Opera misses the mark when it comes to satire, which is a shame, because a dystopian cyberpunk setting like this is rife with opportunities for it (the closest the film comes to settling on one side of an issue is when Shilo sings “My legacy is not up to my genes”). But that’s not a deal-breaker with Repo! It’s a fun film that, while not scary in the traditional sense, is never far away from horror.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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