Repo Man (1984 film)

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Repo Man

Theatrical release poster
Directed by Alex Cox
Produced by Peter McCarthy
Jonathan Wacks
Written by Alex Cox
Starring Emilio Estevez
Harry Dean Stanton
Music by The Plugz
Cinematography Robby Müller
Editing by Dennis Dolan
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date(s) March 2, 1984
Running time 92 min. (approx.)
Country Flag of the United States United States
Language English
Budget US$1.5 million
Gross revenue $3,750,080
Allmovie profile
IMDb profile

Repo Man is a 1984 cult film directed by Alex Cox. It was produced by Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy, with executive producer Michael Nesmith, and stars Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton.

Contents

[edit] Plot

Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), an alienated young punk rocker living in mid-1980s Los Angeles, is fired from his menial supermarket stock clerk job. At a party, he finds his girlfriend having sex with his best friend. He soon finds that his pot-smoking, ex-hippie parents have donated his college savings account to a televangelist, supposedly to supply Bibles to El Salvador. Depressed and broke, Otto falls in with Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) a seasoned repo man working for the disingenuously named "Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation", a small-time automobile repossession agency. While repelled by the concept at first, Otto's opinion is rapidly changed when he is paid cash for his first "job."

Otto soon learns that "the life of a Repo Man is always intense." He enjoys the drug use, real-life car chases, and good pay. His old punk rock lifestyle seems boring by comparison, and he begins to develop a rapport with his fellow repo men as well. When he returns to a punk club to see a lounge act (played by real-life hardcore band Circle Jerks), he is amazed at how terrible they now seem.

Soon, Bud, Otto and competing repo men all over town are searching for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu from New Mexico, ludicrously overvalued at $20,000; this vehicle, unknown to them, contains something mysterious and dangerously powerful in its trunk, also sought by a strange female FBI agent, Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes) and her staff.

The film draws on the experiences of director Alex Cox, who worked briefly as a repo man in Los Angeles, but soon deviates into the surreal with aliens, the CIA, punk rocker thieves and other strange characters and situations, all amid a long string of running gags and almost-impossible coincidences.

[edit] Cast

[edit] Awards

1985 Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror Films (Saturn Awards)

Repo Man was ranked #7 on Entertainment Weekly's "Top 50 Cult Films of All-Time". [1]

[edit] Notable Motifs

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Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (April 2008)
  • References to "plates", "shrimp", or "plate of shrimp" throughout, for example a poster advertising "Plate 'o' Shrimp, luncheon special" can be seen in the window behind the payphone used to phone Marlene after the Rodriguez Brothers acquire the Malibu.
  • In the hospital scene, a "Dr. Benway" and a "Mr. Lee" are paged. Both are characters from novels by William S. Burroughs.
  • "Dioretix", a pun on L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and the term diuretic.
  • The dangerous glow emitted from the trunk of the Chevy Malibu may be a homage to the bright, glowing contents of the mysterious box in the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly directed by Robert Aldrich. A similar device can be seen in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction.
  • Food and beverages throughout the movie appear in generic white containers with blue-lettered labels reading among others, "Beer", "Drink", "Dry Gin", "Food (Meat Flavored)", and "Tasteeos". This style of labelling was actually used by Ralphs Grocery Company in southern California for their generic products. Ralph's donated some of the props for the movie. English band Public Image Ltd. released their 1986 album entitled Album with similar generic artwork.
  • Pine-scented car deodorisers shaped like evergreen trees are placed in most cars. These items were one of the few sponsored items (along with Ralph's generic goods above) in this movie and hundreds of these deodorisers were donated to the filmmakers for this movie, without scent. Miller, the mechanic-philosopher, also noted the pervasive presence of the scented pine tree deodorisers in repossessed cars, telling Otto, "You'll find one in every car. You'll see." Later in the film, one even appears on a policeman's motorcycle. They can also be seen hanging from the ceiling in the scene at Miller's house.
  • Many of the "repo men" of Helping Hand are named after brands of beer popular in the US or allude to beer: Bud, Oly, Lite and Miller.
  • Quite a few Los Angeles-based punk rock musicians are cast in roles large and small, including: Dick Rude and Keith Morris (with his band, the Circle Jerks) as well as the Untouchables (as the scooter guys). Also cast is Los Angeles club maven, Rodney Bingenheimer (a.k.a. "Rodney on the ROQ") in a cameo appearance as a club owner. Bingenheimer's name is spelt "Benegenheimer" in the credits. The Circle Jerks perform as a very poor lounge act (the source of Otto's lament, "I can't believe I used to like these guys!") as they grind out a slow, "swinging" lounge version of the normally raucous "When the Shit Hits the Fan". Circle Jerks bassist Zander Schloss plays Kevin, a friend of Otto's who works with him at the supermarket and has numerous appearances throughout the film (see above).
  • Posters for "Harry Pace for City Council" in the background throughout the film. (Alex Cox has said that "Harry Pace" was an indirect reference to "happy face." Leila (played by Olivia Barash) wears smiley face pins. Otto is wearing a smiley face pin when he spots the Chevy Malibu. The doctor's jacket Otto steals in the hospital also has a smiley face badge on the lapel.
  • The scene when Agent Rogersz and Leila torture Otto appears to be a reference to the Milgram experiment.
  • As Bud and Otto pursue repossession opportunities throughout the seedier parts of Los Angeles their path seems to continually follow or intersect with that of Otto's punk friends. On more than one occasion, Bud and Otto visit a convenience store just after (or during) a robbery committed by Duke, Archie and Debbi.
  • In the party scene at a local bar where we see the repo men's wives, several of the wives are played by drag queens.
  • One wife in particular is played by Angelique Pettyjohn, most famous for her appearance in the The Gamesters of Triskelion episode of Star Trek: The Original Series.
  • The opening credits are shown in geographic sequence. This is the apparent route of the car that is being pursued by the various parties involved. The map starts in Los Alamos, New Mexico (the location of the Los Alamos National Laboratory), travels westward into Arizona, and when the opening credits end, it shows the location as being outside Needles, California.
  • The picture of "four alien bodies" is allegedly two condoms filled with water and decorated with a pair of tiny grass skirts, arranged to resemble a plate of shrimp.[citation needed]
  • Miller (Tracey Walter), a scruffy, oddball mechanic working for Helping Hand, refuses to learn to drive, explaining that the "more you drive, the less intelligent you are."
  • In the edited-for-television version, the expletives have been dubbed by the original actors. "Fuck you, you motherfucker" was changed to, "Flip you, you melon farmer". Cox also incorporated scenes absent from the cinema version into the television one.
  • Otto's friend Kevin, (Zander Schloss), appears many times throughout the movie:
    • In the scene when the repo men go to beat up Mr. Humphries for firing Otto, Kevin can be seen in the background just before Humphries is hit with the baseball bat.
    • Near the end of the movie when Otto and the Rodriguez brothers go to bust Bud out of the hospital, one of them pulls back the cover on a hospital bed. Kevin is in the bed and just says, "Otto?" His glasses are smashed and he has been beaten up (by the repo men in the previous scene).
  • In the scene where Otto repossesses a car from Bruce Ipezen at the laundromat, a dead body can be seen on the floor in the background.
  • In the scene where Otto asks his parents if he can have his college money now, they are smoking pot while watching a televangelist.
  • In the end credits, everyone is credited by their character name. Some of the characters are so obscure, it is impossible to tell who they are.
  • During the scene where the agents are investigating the motorcycle cop who was fried by opening the trunk of the car, two things can be heard:
    • The police dispatcher is still calling out over the radio asking what the cop is doing even though it's the next day: "Are you still out there? Quit messing around..."
    • The deputy who is asking the agents what caused this mumbles something about how, "I think Canadian bacon is better myself."
  • When Otto repos the old Mexican guy's car, the scene shows him from an upstairs window. The car is is a 2-door from this view. Later when Otto drives away, the car is now a 4-door.
  • When Otto and Bud race the Rodriguez Brothers in the river bed, there is one scene where the scientist, J. Frank Parnell, is actually driving the car.
  • Mysteriously, whenever a car signals a turn, it turns opposite the direction in which it signalled.
  • The infamous car (carrying the alien payload in its trunk) has New Mexico license plates labelled with "127-GBH" and "Land Of Enchantment":
    • Charged GBH are a UK hardcore punk rock band. GBH also stands for the British legal phrase, grievous bodily harm.
    • 127 is a Mersenne prime (27 - 1) and as such it is the largest integer that can be represented by a signed byte. Additionally, 127 is related to the perfect number 8,128 (Pythagoras studied perfect numbers for their mystical properties). In 1876, 127 was discovered as a double Mersenne number (2127 - 1) which was and still is the largest prime ever discovered (by hand calculations).
    • At the end of the movie when the entire car is glowing, the car's license plate appears to be mirrored backwards. This mirroring shows that the strange "glowing effect" of the car was partly created using a photographic negative.
  • Bud warns Otto that he doesn't allow Christians to ride in his car - nor does he allow communists. Later, at the end of the movie, a priest approaches the repossessed, glowing United Fruitcake Organization car captured by Bud. The car proceeds to zap the priest's Bible and burns it.
  • The closing credits of most movies scroll upwards (names appear from the bottom of the screen and move to the top). The Repo Man closing credits scroll downwards in the opposite direction.
  • The Californian ska/rock band The Aquabats use samples of dialogue from the movie to start and end their song "CD Repo Man" on the album The Return of the Aquabats. The band also uses the quote "Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead" for the lyrics of their song "Chemical Bomb" on the album The Aquabats! vs. the Floating Eye of Death!.

[edit] Soundtrack

Repo Man (Original Soundtrack)
Repo Man (Original Soundtrack) cover
Soundtrack by Various Artists
Released 1984
Genre Soundtrack
Length 37:20
Label MCA
Professional reviews

The soundtrack features now-classic punk rock tracks by Black Flag, the Circle Jerks, Suicidal Tendencies, Iggy Pop and others. Producer Mike Nesmith has a small cameo role (a mock TV commercial taken from his video production Elephant Parts).

It was meant to capture an angry spirit and features a collection of punk bands of the time.

  1. "Repo Man" performed by Iggy Pop – 5:11
  2. "TV Party" performed by Black Flag – 3:50
  3. "Institutionalized" performed by Suicidal Tendencies – 3:49
  4. "Coup d'État" performed by The Circle Jerks – 1:59
  5. "El Clavo y la Cruz" performed by The Plugz – 2:56
  6. "Pablo Picasso" performed by Burning Sensations – 4:01
  7. "Let's Have a War" performed by Fear – 2:29
  8. "When the Shit Hits the Fan" performed by The Circle Jerks – 3:11
  9. "Hombre Secreto (Secret Agent Man)" performed by The Plugz [Spanish] – 1:46
  10. "Bad Man" performed by Juicy Bananas – 4:59
  11. "Reel Ten" performed by The Plugz – 3:09
  • Tributes

Indie-rock label American Laundromat Records has announced plans to release a tribute to the film in 2008 with some of their favorite artists covering the classic punk-rock tracks. At the suggestion of Alex Cox himself, the tribute will include a bonus track "Burning Down The House" by The Talking Heads. The song was supposed to appear in a scene of the original film but the scene was cut due to song clearance issues.

[edit] Sequel

A semi-sequel titled Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, also written by Cox, was released as a graphic novel in March 2008 after funds could not be raised for filming. The novel is published by Gestalt Publishing and is illustrated by Chris bones and Justin Randall.

[edit] External links

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American films of the 1980s
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