Camp, Punk, and Goth-Rock Galore in ‘Repo! The Genetic Opera’
Junk Food Cinema is a monthly spotlight on trash flicks, hidden gems, and (not) guilty pleasures.
by Natalie Bauer
In 2009, I saw Repo! The Genetic Opera at a cramped midnight showing at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago with a couple of friends. The younger audience that surrounded us heckled a preview for the newest Twilight movie, then went euphoric for Repo!’s beginning credits and continued in that manner all the way up until the end. They welcomed each and every harmonious act with untamed howls, shouted simultaneously with every lyric, and cheerfully clapped for each finale. At no point was the mood beneath densely-stacked elation for an hour and thirty-eight minutes of blood-drenched torment and misfortune articulated in musical verse.
Repo! presents the miserable, grisly, and unappreciated youths of the modern age with the invariable delights given to earlier eras by its united powers: camp, aggro-metal, punk subculture, industrial music, goth-rock, horror movie gore, and morbid fun. As a result, Repo! naturally earns an A for objective, amidst all additional grades arriving on an enthusiastically downward measure.
Located in a gloomy, apocalyptic world in the year 2057, Repo recounts miscreants and bigwigs in a realm where voluntary medical procedures are humankind’s fundamental thrill. GeneCo, the enterprise that provides the corporeal materials, must periodically snatch their assets back due to financial delinquency. Spy Kids kid Alexa Vega stars as an adolescent hermit who may or may not be afflicted with a strange blight. Her dad (Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Anthony Stewart Head) looks after her per diem. Nightly, he dresses in leather and assorted electrical gadgetry and serves as a liquidator, reaping gratuitous bodily appendages even though they’re nonetheless operational.
Outside in the thick of the sewer scum, a ghoul (Terrance Zdunich) uses his grave-robbing craft to embezzle a protoplasmic liquid coveted by surgery devotees. At the concert hall, Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman) mechanically launches images from her stereoptic gaze and intones a shrill pitch for crowds whose facial features are too taut to convey any sort of emotive response. Paul Sorvino flaunts his elegantly skilled vocals as the leader of GeneCo. His undeserving beneficiaries are portrayed by Bill Moseley (also known as Chop-Top from Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2), Ogre from the band Skinny Puppy, and Paris Hilton.
Despite that story line and that all-star lineup, Repo! has not one trace of sarcasm, self-consciousness, or so much as the smallest amount of external context. From the complicated, industrial-metal supporting structure of the songs to the dreadfully specific guts-shredding, Repo!’s atmosphere of pain, seclusion, and diffidence shine in lyrical bulk. By its very nature, Repo! melodically mirrors an outright appreciation for the musical genre as well as the wistfully agony-driven hard-rock public of all ages.
To this day, it remains a hyperspace-generation karaoke musical that fully gorges on the film’s most ardent of fans.