Repo Chick (now on home video)

[REPO CHICK is now available on home video.]

Review by Charles Cassady Jr.

For a few months there in the 1980s, British director Alex Cox was "hot," as Paris Hilton might say. He had back-to-back hits with SID AND NANCY and REPO MAN, two movies that captured the "punk" aesthete probably better than most - and, to REPO MAN's credit, that scrambled satire about SoCal car-repossession specialists didn't even have a music-club backdrop to put across its brand of f***-everything nihilism.

After dropping off the radar for a while, the unashamedly leftist Cox had been teasing the fanboys with talk of a REPO MAN sequel, as market-driven and studio sellout as that concept might seem. What, would the repo men meet Freddy, Jason, or Chucky? Would the soundtrack be hip-hop? Mike Nesmith produced the first one; maybe the aged Monkees could cameo?
Now here is REPO CHICK in direct-to-video purgatory, and once again Paris Hilton would seem to be a major element. REPO CHICK isn't quite a sequel to its midnight-movie-mainstay forebear any more than SHOCK TREATMENT is a direct encore of THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. Like SHOCK TREATMENT it shows the same weird DNA as its predecessor from time to time and has some fresh moments, but in the end isn't quite as enjoyable, either. Could have been worse, I guess, and maybe this might attain a fraction of cult-hood in time. Weirder things have happened.

Biggest carryover from REPO MAN (besides several surviving cast members like Olivia Barash, Del Zamora and Miguel Sandoval, playing different characters. Sorry, no Harry Dean Stanton, Emilio Estevez or the late Fox Harris) is the idea that, thanks to economic mortgage-failure collapse, the repossession business is California/America's biggest growth industry. The still-grubby guys in their tow trucks show up to seize whole shopping centers, churches, housing developments, planes, trains and automobiles on behalf of the banks. Pixxi (Jaclyn Jonet) is a Paris Hilton/Heidi Montag spoiled, pink-clad heiress and "performance artist," running her own self-aggrandizing record label/fashion house, and followed everywhere by a personal reality-TV entourage of effete, illiterate punk videographers.

When her snobby old-money LA family disinherits her for ongoing embarrassments, the repo men arrive to take her car. Inconceivably, Pixxi gets a job doing repos herself and, surprisingly (or not; there's zero consistency to the character, just schtick) proves to be phenomenal at it, and she vengefully initiates foreclosure on her own family via some simple computer alterations of the ledgers.

Pixxi also fixates on the script's MacGuffin, which in the first film was a Ford Galaxy with dead, decaying, dangerous space aliens in the trunk. Here it's a missing train with a million-dollar repo bounty, secretly sought by Homeland Security because it carries a load of late-model Soviet satellite-weapon bombs of some sort. Pixxi finds the locomotive with ridiculous ease - it's being borrowed to shuttle legions of LA's new homeless people out of town, but it is also under the control of militant environmentalists who plan to use the bombs as a terror threat to get the unseen, spineless US president to ban golf.

Except maybe for an underestimated black domestic and a bunch of characters who show up late in the action claiming to be a newer, nicer, more sensitive breed of communists, Cox isn't particularly in favor of anything here; evangelists, politicians, vegan tree-huggers, developers, businessmen, scientists, patriots, liberal nanny-state bureaucrats, and ugly schmoes-in-the-street all come in for exaggerated Vaudeville bashing, without the quotable lines or much of the sense of catharsis that made the first REPO so bracing. The degree of truly outrageous stuff is so mild it's possible the thing might have been rated PG-13.

The visual style is probably the most comment-worthy. Just like CONCEIVING ADA, which also had Karen Black in the supporting cast (anyone seen CONCEIVING ADA? Anyone? Anywhere?) this whole feature appears to be have been done in a 360-degree green-screen setup, with actors unrealistically digitized into cartoon layouts or miniatures (several Los Angeles model-railroad clubs are duly thanked in the credits) throughout, which is interesting - though for many viewers maybe not interesting enough.

I guess the best way to imagine REPO CHICK is yet another Cox-eyed view of crummy, consumerist American (well, Californian) culture, updated from REPO MAN's vapid underbelly of the Reagan go-go 1980s to Governor Schwarzenegger's bankrupt state in the 21st century, where massive wealth and
celebrity largesse mixes with unforgivable debt, bailouts, economic and social failure, "new media" and whole industries and institutions devoted to not producing anything substantial at all. And this picture is...how different from that? Okay, take it or leave it. And shut up, fanboys, about when will there ever be a REPO MAN sequel. Go hound John Waters about finally shooting FLAMINGOES FOREVER with John Travolta and his HAIRSPRAY tranny fat suit. 2 out of 4 stars.