There’s no denying that Repo! The Genetic Opera has plenty of imagination, but right now it’s still spinning around in my brain and I’m trying to decide if I like it or not. The first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I thought it was one of the worst movies I’d ever seen, despite Tim Curry’s stellar performance. Is Repo! destined for the same cult status? The only answer I can come up with is… maybe.
Based on a 10 minute opera called “The Necro-Merchant’s Debt” by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich (who plays the Graverobber in the movie), Repo! later become a stageplay, and then they brought Saw sequel director Darren Lynn Bousman on board, and now a movie. It’s an epic opera set in the future, where a corporation called GeneCo has mastered the art of creating synthetic body organs. However, they come at a steep price, and if you don’t pay up, the company will send Repo Men after you to reclaim their property. Which of course usually results in the death of the implantee.
This serves as the backdrop for the opera portion of the movie, in which Rotti Largo, owener of GeneCo, struggles with his three nasty children: violent Luigi, face-transplant Pavi, and surgery-obsessed Amber Sweet, played by Paris Hilton. Yes, that Paris Hilton. On the flipside of the Repo!-verse are Shilo Wallace, 17 year old girl in a bubble who kept locked up at home by her father, Doctor Nathan Wallace. He’s paranoid that her blood disease will kill her, and tries to keep his daughter hermetically sealed at all times.
As often happens in operas, it turns out that Nathan’s dead wife Marni did once love Rotti, but she left him for Nathan. Rotti couldn’t take the rejection, and he poisoned Marni and made it look like it was Nathan’s fault. He kept Nathan out of jail, but forced him to become one of his Repo Men. So, he’s a doctor by day and a Repo Man by night. He’s become very good at his job and takes macabre pleasure in it as well.
Rotti discovers he’s dying of a terminal disease that even genetics can’t fix, and he sets about the machinations to bring Nathan’s world crumbling to the ground, while simultaneously denying the inheritance of GeneCo to any of his own kids Thrown into the mix are Blind Mag, a singer with digital GeneCo eyes who serves as the voice of the company who is locked into a perpetual contract with them, and the Graverobber, a man who extracts Zydrate (a glowing blue drug) from corpses around town to feed those who are addicted to the knife, like Amber.
Some of the acting is just truly painful and there are moments of laugh-out-loud bad dialogue, like the phone call Shilo gets out of the blue from Rotti, “Meet me in your mother’s tomb!” Gee, okay, no problem. Paul Sorvino chews up every scene he’s in as the villanous Rotti, and the actor who plays Luigi just can’t act in this role at all, other than to snarl at everyone.
However, there are some standouts, like Anthony Head who is better known as Giles from TV’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Alexa Vega, who played Carmen in the Spy Kids trilogy of films has really grown up, and shines as Shilo, and Paris Hilton actually isn’t bad, although I’m not sure if that’s because she’s playing a limelight obsessed starlet-figure who is consumed with looking perfect. There’s a scene where her new face falls off in the middle of a song, and we’re shown a literally faceless Paris Hilton. Those scenes alone make a better movie than the fluff piece Paris, Not France did.
Oddly enough, the real star of this film turns out to be singer Sarah Brightman who plays Blind Mag. She has some of the best songs in the movie, including “Chase The Morning” with Alexa Vegas, and her digital corneas make her look both creepy and cool at the same time. Calling it now: goth girls will love this look for Halloween. Especially if they can buy those contact lenses somewhere. She has the most tragic storyline in the movie, and her look seems directly inspired by the Living Dead Dolls line of collectibles. Hell, if they actually make a Blind Mag doll, I’d probably buy it. Especially if it has “Holographic Projector Eye Action,” batteries not included.
What’s ironic about the film is that I kept thinking that it would be great if it wasn’t the musical. Many of the numbers just don’t work, either because of the lyrics or the peformances, but I love the sci-fi setting of the story and the arcs of the characters. It’s like a post-Blade Runner steampunk Victoriana world where synthetic organs have replaced Replicants, and the Repo Men are the bladerunners. They wear cool dark surgeon-esque outfits, complete with full facemask helmets with glowing eyes, and you could imagine the terror they’d strike in your gut when they came calling for that very same organ.
Director Bousman said that the studios said the same thing, “Why don’t you do this as a non-musical?,” which he and Zdunich flatly refused to do. So, we’re left with a intriguing story stuck behind an awkward musical in which half of it works, and the other have flails around like a patient without a heart. Goths will love it, mainstream moviegoers will hate it, and horror fans will likely be confused by it. Especially when the other organ repo movie Repossession Mambo hits screens next year. Repo! will have a limited theatrical release in November, and will hit DVD in January 2009.
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