Making one long for his dreadful Saw II, III, and IV, director Darren Lynn Bousman’s Repo! The Genetic Opera rips off heavy
metal and horror aesthetics to absolutely dismal effect. With junky comic book-paneled
sequences, musical numbers marked by graceless, strident melodies and generic
chunk-chunk guitars, and a goth style drenched in gore, Bousman’s rock-opera
plays like a spastic, semi-incoherent extended music video for Type O Negative
by way of Evanescence. It’s a faux-grim, pop-inflected mood piece with a legion
of obvious influences (Moulin Rouge!,
Rocky Horror, every other metal act
from the last twenty years) and yet barely a coherent idea in its mushy head. Revolving
around a future in which genetic manipulation is a designer fad, and
repossessions of purchased organs are carried out by mega-corp GeneCo’s dreaded
Repo Man (oooh, health care scariness!), Bousman’s script is almost as bumpy
and inane as his cinematography is flashy-cruddy. Paris Hilton is well cast as
a surgery-addicted heiress but, like castmates Paul Sorvino, Bill Mosley and Alexa Vega, she can’t sing, and any tongue-in-cheek
energy to her performance is lost amidst the director’s messy staging and his
plot’s inane machinations. On the other hand, Sarah Brightman, playing a singer
with robot eyes, and Anthony Stewart Head, as the Repo Man, certainly can sing, but the lyrics stuffed into their mouths are
of an embarrassing sort, thereby further emphasizing the fact that there’s no
rhythm or spark to the front-and-center songs. Given its baroque Grand Guignol
outlandishness, Repo! is clearly
aiming for cheesy camp, but its across-the-board awfulness is, ultimately, just
plain ol’ awful.
Anthony Stewart Head is a good singer.
Posted by: Lauren | November 05, 2008 at 11:54 PM
True. I've corrected my mistake.
Posted by: Nick | November 06, 2008 at 07:30 AM
Hmm, well it seems your review is right on par with most of the major publications, and quite the opposite of smaller publications and blogs.
I myself, look forward to seeing it in hopes that it is either a great, yet misunderstood bit of cinema, or so bad that it becomes a guilty pleasure.
Posted by: jimmy curry | December 02, 2008 at 05:22 AM
Now that I've finally seen this dreadful thing, I've gotta say that I feel pretty much everyone (you, Ed, etc.) were pretty damn generous in your condemnations of it. Within about 5 minutes of this thing I wanted to strangle everyone involved on a creative level. Am I becoming an old, crusty curmudgeon too fast, or are so many of these movies just THAT BAD?
Posted by: rob | January 21, 2009 at 02:38 AM