Just a Lost Soul Swimmin' in a Fish Bowl

Repo! The Genetic Opera November 22, 2010

For those of you thinking this title has anything to do with that piece of crap movie with Jude Law and Forest Whitaker – you are sadly mistaken.

Last week I was surfing around a friend’s Netflix account trying to find something interesting to pass the time when I stumbled across a title that I had been meaning to watch ever since I saw the trailer for it on a Saw DVD – Repo! The Genetic Opera.

While I knew this film was going to be anything but ordinary – I had no idea the kind of onslaught of visual and auditory carnage I was about to experience.

The lovechild of Sweeney Todd, Hostel, and the Beverly Hills scene of Escape from L.A., this movie is quite possibly one of the most disturbing and haunting things I have ever watched; and I cannot get enough of it. Even Paris Hilton’s character blew me away. Amber Sweet – a spoiled, slutty, heiress with a drug addition. Wait… she didn’t have to act at all did she?

Taking place in the year 2056, the population of the world was ravaged by an epidemic of failing organs. Like a beacon of light, the company GeneCo emerged with the ability to provide organs to those in need of them – organs that are financed. And just like your car and your home, these organs can be repossessed if you fall behind on payments.

With this technology, the trend of “making your x-ray sexier” became all the rage. People were having surgeries to replace their hearts, kidneys, corneas, and everything else in between on a daily and weekly basis. Of course, with this kind of treatment to your body came terrible pain and agony. But wait! GeneCo rises again and creates a very expensive and highly addictive pain-killer, Zydrate. For those scalpel sluts that can’t afford the real stuff, a cheap knock off that is harvested from the brains of the dead is sold on the street (sounds tempting, doesn’t it?).

The plot centers around a young girl who is quarantined in her bedroom by her overprotective father. She has been told that she has a blood disease she inherited from her dead mother. Her father, who happens to be GeneCo’s #1 Repoman, has a haunted past and deathly connection with the founder of GeneCo, Rotti Largo.

If the blood and gore of legal assassinations and organ repossession or comic relief from a murderer and a rapist don’t keep you interested, the twists, turns, and intertwined destinies of the characters will. An absolutely riveting storyline told through comic-book style story boards and the narration of a strangely endearing and charismatic Graverobber lies in the background of a catchy, dark, and absolutely splendid soundtrack.

An honest to God bloody, can’t-tear-your-eyes-away (but GeneCo will if you default on them) sort of film, Repo! will not disappoint any fan of the manic and horrific.