Plowing the same field as Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, the rock opera Repo! The Genetic Opera is from director Darren Lynn Bousman of Saw 2, 3 and 4 but it has more imagination and wit than the entire Saw franchise put together. Burton's Sweeney did the gore musical with more money and bigger stars, but despite its claustrophobic staging and "let's put on a show" stylization, Repo! still delivers enough blood, guts and musical glory to securely capture its target demographic: Teenage girls. If the teens and tweens who went to see High School Musical 3 wind up taking a look at Repo! then this flick has a chance of becoming a big, big hit. It's a Miley Cyrus movie for kids who read Twilight and buy Emily the Strange T-shirts.
Kicking off in a series of budget-saving comic book panels, Repo! tells the story of a future world where the mighty GeneCo has cornered the market in replacement organs and body parts. Their payment plans come with a catch, however -- miss enough and the Repo Men come and take back that heart, kidney or pair of eyes with a snicker snack slice of their shiny knives. Cut to: A city of goths who plunder graveyards the way homeless people go through the garbage, looking for recyclables they can sell to buy a little something to make all their troubles go away, in this case the mega-effective GeneCo painkiller Zydrate. In the middle of this swirl of black lipstick and latex corsets are two motherless families, the Wallaces and the Largos.
The Largo family owns GeneCo, and Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino) rules his clan with an iron fist. His children are a degenerate bunch waiting for him to die so they can take over the family business. There's daughter Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton) who's addicted to surgery and his two warring sons: Rage-a-holic Luigi Largo (cult film stalwart Bill Moseley) and simpering hedonist Pavi Largo (Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy) who wears women's faces over his own mutilated mug.
The Wallace family is just single dad Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head of TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and daughter Shilo (Alexa Vega from Spy Kids). Mom died in childbirth due to a rare blood disease, and Nathan keeps Shilo locked up and medicated so that she can avoid her mother's fate. But there are secrets shared by the two families, long-buried but just waiting to burst up out of the grave. The key to these secrets is the pop culture diva and GeneCo spokesperson, Blind Mag (Sarah Brightman), a blind chanteuse who knows a thing or two about the bad blood between Rotti Largo and Nathan Wallace. By the time the film's over more blood will flow than in an Anne Rice novel and more high notes will be screeched than at a Diamanda Galas concert.
Repo! lives up to its billing, but it's more opera than rock. Carpeted in wall-to-wall music most of the songs are effective, with the later numbers standing head-and-shoulders above the first few. But little of it is very memorable, although only a teen-rebellion number called "Seventeen" causes actual cringing. Sarah Brightman -- Andrew Lloyd Webber's one-time muse -- is a diva of the first order and her two solos are the highlights of the movie, but Anthony Stewart Head gives her a run for her money. His voice is a little ragged, but he sings like his heart is on fire and his head is about to explode with emotions, demonstrating that he's more than just Giles from Buffy.
Limited to just a few sets (which were reportedly built with money pilfered from one of the Saw movies) and full of campy goth excess, Repo! only lapses in good taste happen at the expense of Paris Hilton -- her face peels away and falls off while she sings --- but bad taste is expected when you're dealing with Hilton. Ultimately, this is a kid's movie for slightly strange kids who want something a little less mature than Sweeney Todd and a little more adult than High School Musical 3.
Grady Hendrix is one of the founders and programmers of the New York Asian Film Festival. He writes about Asian film for Variety at Kaiju Shakedown and should have found something better to do with his life by now.
