The cop pulls the Malibu over and inside a man with slicked back hair and grey, bushy sideburns sits slouched over, one lens in his shades, and the rows of teeth in his jaw grinding away at each other.
"What'd you got in the trunk?"
"Oh, you don't want to look in there."
The cop pops open the trunk and is caught in an intense, bright glow that emanates from the cargo, vaporizing the police officer down to his skeleton like a radioactive x-ray, his body part of the desert, leaving behind a pair of smoking boots.
Blu-ray courtesy of The Criterion Collection on April 16th.
The film is a predecessor to the punk-rock movement in Southern California in the mid-1980s, the beginning of the film kick starts with the countdown of drumsticks clicking together. The opening theme music, composed by The Stooges front man Iggy Pop, creates a driving rhythm over the image of a computer rendered image of downtown Los Angeles, similar to the design of the home video cover.
Otto, played by a young Emilio Estevez, stocks shelves at a small grocery store. The products are contained in bland white and blue designs, where a can of coffee is labeled "coffee" and drinks are labeled "drinks," placing the viewer in an ordinary world like yours and mine but signaling that something is just slightly off.
Otto is part of the underground punk scene, getting fired from his job and joining in with his mohawk-wearing and skinhead friends in violent mosh gatherings and listening to brain rattling music. And when he finds his girlfriend in bed with his best friend, he quits the scene and hopes his parents can help him out financially. But his parents blew his inheritance on a television televangelist, paying to ship bibles to impoverished nations.
Without a girl, friends, a job, or a future, Otto meets Bud, portrayed by veteran character actor Harry Dean Stanton, who gets Otto to drive his wife's car out of a seedy section of Los Angeles. Only problem is the car doesn't belong to Bud or his wife but to some dude who doesn't speak a lick of English and feels the best form of negotiation is to grip his fingers around Otto's neck.
Otto is introduced into the world of repo men (a job Emilio Estevez is probably working currently), taking cars from people who haven't paid their bills. The office is a little commercial trailer set-up in the middle of the desert. Bud looks like a used car salesman wearing a dress shirt and tie, his sleeves giving himself a blood pressure reading and drinking such large quantities of coffee that he should just be drinking from the pot. But Bud sees his image another way: "a detective, a square, because they think you're packing. They don't fuck with you as much."
Let Miller impart some wisdom on you - the smartest man in the repo business.
Otto learns the ins-and-outs of the business of repossession and gets a lesson in the code of a repo man: "only an asshole gets killed for a car." And under the bluish, purple haze of a smog drenched L.A., the mundane life of a repo man is turned upside down when the job of a lifetime comes over the wire: a '64 Chevy Malibu, the prize: $20,000.
During one of his jobs, Otto picks up a girl walking down the street who shows him a picture of four dead aliens that are riding around in the back of a Chevy Malibu. She says a scientist smuggled the corpses of a military base, and now the cops, government agents, including a woman with a metal hand, and the rival Mexican Rodriguez Brothers are after the prize.
Repo Man is a deliberate, hilarious take on President Regan's domestic and foreign policies, where problems of unemployment and illegal "aliens" are brought to the forefront.
"And in the end," says one of Otto's friends who gets gunned down trying to rob a convince store, "I blame society. Society made me what I am."
"That's bullshit," says Otto. "You're a white suburban punk just like me."
Featuring numerous memorable quotes and a killer soundtrack of L.A. hardcore and punk musicians, such as Iggy Pop, Black Flag and the Suicidal Tendencies, Repo Man is a defining cult film of 1980s America.
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