Previously posted on blog and written by S. Kess
Have you ever sat around glad to have the pig heart that was surgically implanted in you but worried about what happens if you miss a payment?
In the future of “Repo! The Genetic Opera” your Porky little heart may be repossessed. Ripped from your body while still beating. Leaving you nothing but an inanimate meat sack. Now imagine that while a debt collecting surgeon rips your porcine blood pump from your chest, he sings an operatic metal song. Welcome to a grave new world.
“Repo! The Genetic Opera” is a horror-musical that takes place in the year 2056. Organ failure is running wild and one company, GeneCo, has the vision to sell organs to buyers on credit. The company lobbies to have the law changed so that people who cannot pay for their organs can have them repossessed leaving them dead in most cases.
Special repo men, who are butchers as much as they are surgeons, hunt down the debt-laden and chop away until they get what they need. At the same time, GeneCo has been spreading a pain medication called Zydrate that is highly addictive. So, people with transplants spend all their money on drugs and end up defaulting on their organ payments. The drug stays in bodies after death so grave robbing has become lucrative with bandits sucking out the drug from corpses with syringes. The penalty for being caught slurping the juice from corpses is death.
The film’s plot has many contemporaneous threads but all are interconnected masterfully. There are two primary stories. One of a father desperately trying to keep his sick daughter well by any means necessary. The other is about Rotti, the head of GeneCo, trying to decide on an heir to the company while finding his adult children… lacking as they are all nitwits with big aspirations.
“Repo!” is a heavy metal soap opera with an emphasis on the “opera” as the musical and vocals often soar. It leans hard into being a musical; I cannot recall a single line of dialogue that isn’t sung. The heavily musical nature of the film makes for some weirdness as lines are forced to fit rhyme schemes and the music; unfortunately, it doesn’t work all the time.
Normally I am all for exposition in song, but if it screws up your song you need to find a different way or rewrite the lyrics. Some exposition takes the form of “comic book” style panels but that doesn’t really fix the problem, as they interrupt the flow and take focus from the characters.
The GeneCo plan makes no sense at all either, as both sides of their business plan require killing their clients. GeneCo doesn’t even collect the Zydrate from the corpses themselves to resell it! It is almost like the company is run by an idiotic narcissist and his three moron children.
There are some good vocalists (Paul Sorvino can belt it out Pavarotti style, which probably explains his character’s name) and generally fun, if not good, performances. Paris Hilton as the daughter of a rich man who has so much surgery her face falls off is kind of inspired. The film’s set and costume designs are intensely colorful and it creates a vibrantly fun world that doesn’t feel real but has a theatrical groundedness.
Overall, “Repo! The Genetic Opera” is a very uneven movie with the good slightly outweighing the bad. It is also a movie that you should watch if only for the sheer spectacle. And honestly, we need more spectacle in film. “Repo!” sets a goal and goes all-out in pursuit of its mad destination, it’s worth the journey.
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