The 1980s File: The one with the flying Chevy

 

 

Title: Repo Man

What Year?: 1984

Classification: Irreproducible Oddity/ Mashup

Rating: It’s Okay! (3/3)

 

With this review, I’m continuing a lineup I started without really knowing what I would do. I knew I wanted to do Never Say Never Again, and I had another I had meant to do all along. For the third, I considered a number of famous, infamous and obscure movies from the 1980s. The major parameter I settled on was to do something I wouldn’t review under normal circumstances, which set aside the sci fi/ fantasy genres and most horror. That still left several very promising candidates. (I’ll name-drop Heathers, dear Logos…) In the end, however, I went with one that simply landed in my lap. I present Repo Man, and truly, it is one of the most Eighties of all Eighties movies.

Our story begins with a proto-slacker Otto who has just been fired from his job and found out his girlfriend is cheating on him. At his early low, a stranger approaches him, offering money to move what he says is his own car. But it turns out that the car is really being repossessed, and Otto has found his true calling. Soon, he is deep in the world of repo men (and repo wives), where he learns of dangerous car thieves and coveted bounties. In the process, he meets a new girl who insists she knows something about the biggest bounty of all. It’s a mysterious car we have already seen, a Chevy Malibu driven by a weirdo with glasses that leaves a trail of dead bodies and even worse when anyone opens the trunk.  Everyone is after the ultimate Maguffin, and Otto is the one person who the weirdo has taken for a ride!

Repo Man was a 1984 comedy/ science fiction film written and directed by Alex Cox. The film was produced by the late Michael Nesmith, a member of the Monkees, who reportedly secured a distribution deal with Universal. The film starred Emilio Estevez (see Maximum Overdrive) as Otto and Harry Dean Stanton (d. 2017) as his mentor Bud, with Tracey Walter (see Conan the Destroyer) as their colleague Miller. The main theme/ theme song was written and performed by Iggy Pop (see… Hardware?). The punk group The Circle Jerks made a credited appearance as a nightclub band. The film was a modest commercial success, earning $3.7 million against a $1.5M budget, and earned good reviews from critics including SF/ fantasy authors and scholars such as Neil Gaiman. A cut for network television was created by Cox. It became a successful cult film on home video and television. The film remains available on digital platforms. The soundtrack also remains available on CD and in digital form, though Amazon does not offer the digital album.

 For my experiences, this is one I first heard of from books on science fiction movies. While I was interested, I didn’t watch it until I noticed it available for streaming, probably upwards of 10 years ago. What kept it in my mind was the question of whether to count it as science fiction. I was going back and forth on that just in writing the review up to this point, finally conceding the point simply because many other sources do so. In my own opinion, this is another film where the best description is surrealist/ urban fantasy, a gray-area distinction that comes up more often with films usually classified as horror (see Troll, The Gate). Even then, I find it to be a “mainstream” comedy with genre elements rather than vice versa. In further hindsight, that is the main reason it works as well as it does.

Moving forward, I have to say that this is a movie I just don’t “get”, and I am all the more sure of that after a fresh viewing. What does work for me is Estevez, whom I have always found entertaining and memorable, though I can only think of about 4 movies I have seen him in. Stanton, who I forgot was in Alien twice, is even better, without pushing beyond his costar status. Together, they have a very effective rapport that takes a raw turn when they compete for the same prize in the finale. The one actor who stood out on my usual radar immediately was Walter, who I needed a moment to place. Here, he’s an odd-job man who doesn’t do much until the very end, yet is still watchable enough to leave an impression. Finally, even I have to put in a good word for the music. To me, it feels like it could fit in the 1960s as much as the 1980s, possibly because of the known tendency of “trendy” pop culture to circle back on its trail every 10-20 years. It certainly works, especially in the finale, which has to be seen to be fully appreciated.

Meanwhile, if there’s a “con” to go with this, it’s that the movie doesn’t have much of a plot, and feels like it has even less than it does. Much of the running time is just listing to Otto, Bud and their colleagues complain, which is certainly entertaining. The rest is episodic misadventures and subplots, most of which have little if any impact on the finale. Even the overarching tale of the Chevy doesn’t really develop, which up to a point surely is the point. We see its effects, and we get some sense of its owner, played by the late Fox Harris (also in Deep Space right around the time of his death in 1988), but we never really get any answers to what it is or where it came from. This leaves it not just a Maguffin but the post-modern reductio ad absurdum of a Maguffin. Everybody wants it, nobody knows what if anything they can do with it, it quite clearly causes harm to most if not all who encounter it, and in the end, it’s nothing more or less than a poignant symbol of hopes deferred, lost or unattainable.  In a sense, this is a case of “too much and not enough”. It doesn’t have the deceptive linearity of a well-developed satire like Dawn of the Dead, yet it never reaches the anarchy of the likes of Earth Girls Are Easy. It’s just a competent “mainstream” film that stays within its limits more often than it pushes them.

That leaves the “one scene”, and I’m going with the one that’s out of left field even here. As the finale approaches, we meet up with Otto’s ex Debbie and her new boyfriend, the surviving two-thirds of a gang of robbers that lost a member trying to take the Chevy. As they engage in casual substance abuse, the guy starts to babble about settling down to marriage and family, until the lady gives him a stronger dose. Only then do they go into a liquor store where Otto, Bud and a cop we’ve seen here and there are hanging out. Their guns are already drawn, which doesn’t stop Otto from making oblivious small talk with Debbie, while her new guy emphasizes how completely okay he is with shooting everybody. It quickly turns out that Otto is in fact the only person present who isn’t armed, leading to an almost mechanical shootout worthy of a spaghetti Western. All you need to know is that when the cordite settles, we’re back to Otto and the ex. He gives her a speech about starting over, culminating in the line, “I can make you a repo wife!” It’s at least enough for her to throw him food instead of shooting him. And the absolutely mind-boggling part I literally didn’t believe until I watched a video of the whole sequence again is that absolutely all of this happens in just over two minutes of screen time. Truly, they don’t do pacing like they used to.

In closing, this is a movie where I have no more to say, and really nothing to defend on my own part. As I laid out, there was never going to be a timeline where this one would have been a favorite of mine, however soon or late I had gotten to it. That certainly hasn’t stopped me for appreciating what it is, while also recognizing what it isn’t. If you happen to be one of the people who do love this movie, I’m the last person who will tell you you’re wrong. (Hey, I gave Maximum Overdrive a good review…) All I have to add is, stay with what you love, at least as long as it won’t kill you. That’s enough to call it a day.

Image credit Discogs.