Review: Alex Cox’s Cult Sci-Fi Action Film ‘Repo Man’ on Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray

The utter weirdness of Alex Cox’s remarkable debut—a document of L.A.’s hardcore punk scene that’s also an ode to its car culture, a critique of the American middle class, and a kind-of sci-fi comedy about a radioactive Chevy Malibu—would seem to preclude its existence. And yet here it is. Forty years later, Repo Man is no worse for the wear. Not so much ahead of its time as outside of it, the film’s L.A. punk particularities have broadened over the years. Its ennui has endured not just as a portrait of a certain generation of angry adolescents, but as one of angry adolescence writ large. In a way, the film’s timelessness has always been assured by Cox’s restless protagonist, Emilio Estevez’s suburban punk-cum-repossession agent Otto, who’s always seemed like a bit of a nonentity.

As much as Repo Man’s cult cache may be indebted to its perceived closeness to the SoCal hardcore scene of the early ’80s (the film was originally resurrected theatrically six months after its original run when its soundtrack album topped 50,000 in sales), Cox treats his punks with an odd mix of tenderness and derision. The mohawked goons sound like jocks and look like they wandered off the set of Class of 1984; now-legendary L.A. punks the Circle Jerks appear as a sedate lounge act (“I can’t believe I used to like these guys,” Otto sneers); and kids slamdance in a deserted lot where there’s no visible band (think a hardcore Club Silencio).

Against the dullness of mid-’80s American suburbia, Otto’s self-interested vacuity and directionless rage scan as legitimate, inversely purposeful reactions. The sight of Otto squatted by an overpass, angrily chugging a beer by himself, yelling the lyrics to Black Flag’s “TV Party” (themselves mostly just names of primetime shows of the time) while the Plugz’s soundtrack twangs in the background offers an inspired connection between brooding of-the-era teenage malaise to the grandest tradition of American aimlessness: capitalist expansion bumping up against the nation’s natural borders, manifest destiny running on fumes.

Otto seems to float outside all of this. He’s too pissed-off and empty to compellingly embrace the scene beyond its facility to get him laid, bucking any convincing punk ethos when presented the opportunity of dressing “straight” and beginning a new career recouping cars from anyone who’s fallen behind on their payments. Yet his nihilism—even his dickheadedness—feel earned, beset as he is on one side by “ordinary fuckin’ people” like his pothead Christian parents and on the other by the delinquent dummies he awkwardly pals around with early in the film. In Repo Man, only the affectless (as embodied by Otto) and the faithfully world-weary (as embodied by Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud, Otto’s bedraggled mentor) register as valid. Everyone else around them appears curiously alien—quite literally, as the film progresses.

Repo Man’s critique of its era’s swirling dynamic of excesses and emptiness, and its tendency to engender this alienation, may seem a bit reactionary and adolescent. Yet it remains potent when apprehended in this very energetic, adolescent naïveté. As in John Carpenter’s They Live, another great L.A. film shouldered by a cipher hero (Roddy Piper’s “Nada” drifter), Repo Man’s boneheaded ideological obviousness only endears it further to the susceptible viewer.

Bland white-and-blue cans labeled “lite beer” and “yellow cling sliced peaches” may seem like blunderingly flagrant critiques of capital, but their blatancy is only commensurate with the brazenness of capital itself. Like the sunglasses in Carpenter’s film that magically demystify the existent authoritarian infrastructure by stripping it to its scaffolding, peeling the flesh from the well-dressed power bloc and paring down mock-complex billboards to marching order edicts like “CONSUME” and “OBEY,” Repo Man’s extra-barefaced signposts are in place to productively hail a generation that’s been beaten down under the boot heel of obviousness.

It’s fitting, then, that after Otto has seamlessly transitioned from agent of the rebellious punk-rock counterculture to cowboy-creditor freelancing for the Man, he’s left with no real endgame alternative but to drop out of society altogether, ditching his friends, co-workers, and his girl (Olivia Barash) and taking off into the night in the extraterrestrial Malibu with Tracey Walter’s screwy mechanic. It’s the film’s most cathartically surreal gesture, evoking the stupidly goofball flying-car finale of Grease, but its improbability feels coherent with a film that makes a consistent virtue of its leftfield eccentricity. Having traipsed L.A.’s parking lots, cul-de-sacs, and craggy underpasses on foot, then raced along its serpentine highways in hotwired cars, Otto deserves his god’s-eye-view flyby. Taking it all in from the passenger seat of the glowing, airborne Chevy, Otto seems to intuitively comprehend this perfected top-down grasp of urban and suburban experience, responding the only way he knows how: “Intense.”

Image/Sound

The Criterion Collection’s 2013 Blu-ray already looked fantastic, with a crisp transfer free of any blemishes, but the new 4K presentation, from a new digital restoration, offers a pretty strong boost in image quality. The Dolby Vision HDR really makes the colors pop, especially in the early, vibrant desert-set scenes, without betraying Repo Man’s naturalistic look. The high contrast ratio and inky blacks add an even more surreal feeling to the nighttime sequences, while the improved image detail lends additional grittiness to the film’s portrait of ’80s L.A. through the looking glass. The audio is still only the uncompressed mono track, which is solid enough, though an upgrade to 5.1 would have been nice.

Extras

Criterion has ported over the same slate of extras from their earlier Blu-ray, and considering the sheer variety of the extras on that release, along with its gorgeous digipak packaging, it’s hard to fault Criterion for adhering to the mantra of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The commentary by Alex Cox, producer Michael Nesmith, and several cast members remains an entertaining listen. The group is very conversational as they cover everything from funny behind-the-scenes stories and production issues to the soundtrack and the film’s rise to cult status.

Also of note is a slew of interviews. Especially fascinating is the one with former Black Flag vocalist and Circle Jerks co-founder Keith Morris, who works to further cement the film’s ties to L.A.’s mid-’80s hardcore scene. In another interview, titled “Harry Zen Stanton,” the venerable actor is grilled by producer Peter McCarthy on his career, only to offer up a suitably nihilistic (or, sure, “zen”) worldview based on fatalism and predetermination.

Another feature, “Repossessed,” like the comic illustrated by Cox in the accompanying booklet, explores the film’s production history in detail, while the 25 minutes’ worth of deleted scenes comes with commentary that finds Cox, Nesmith, and the creator of the neutron bomb, Sam Cohen, getting into a debate about nuclear war. The real gem here, though, is the inclusion of the film’s “cleaned-up” television version.” For anyone who ever caught the film in this drastically edited context, this cut is its own differently memorable cult artifact, especially noteworthy for all the creatively cleaned-up swearing, where “Fuck you, you goddamn motherfucker” becomes “Flip you, you good down melon farmer.”

In addition to the comic, the accompanying 70-page bound booklet includes a 1987 interview of real-life repo man Mark Lewis and an essay by critic Sam McPheeters, who teases out the many aspects that make Repo Man such a singular film, paying particular attention to its representation of early ’80s Los Angeles and its now-famed underground punk scene.

Overall

Criterion’s 4K upgrade of Alex Cox’s cult classic Repo Man offers the same eclectic array of extras and imaginative packaging as their 2013 Blu-ray but with an enhanced video presentation that adds to the film’s unusual and ineffable aura.