Review of Repo! The Genetic Opera (2008) by Bradley H — 21 Jun 2011

I've always thought the term "avant garde" as applied to art was self-indulgent and pretentious, but for once I find it fitting since there is no way anyone on the production team could have thought that Repo! The Genetic Opera would have been a success. It's just too weird.

Truthfully, however, Repo! is everything it tries to be: conspicuously theatrical, cheaply gory, familiarly dystopian, and irrationally catchy.

This film is all premise. Read one sentence about, and you will know whether or not you will like it. There is a plot, but its beside the point. Eighty minutes are devoted to setting up each character's back-story, then they are all brought to together for a Shakespearean, blood-bathed catharsis at the very end.

But, again it gives the people (those freaky, cult movie, "avant garde" fans) what they want from a film: fake guts, floating TV billboards, and heavy metal. Even if you don't like it, I'm sure you won't forget it, and you may even get the sudden urge to watch it again in a couple years, like an irrational craving for that Chinese food you once had at the mall five years ago and hated (pregnant women know what I mean).