Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: The excellent Green Room has thinking about some of the best punk rock movies.
Repo Man (1984)
Writer-director Alex Cox’s Repo Man became a cult classic almost immediately. A beacon of subversiveness in Reagan’s sanitized, suburbanized America, the movie had too much of everything: mysterious aliens, a deadly glow in the trunk of a car (similar to what showed up in Pulp Fiction a decade later), and punk rockers galore, along with biting takes that ran the gauntlet from corporate culture to religion.
Punk apathy is personified by Otto, played by Emilio Estevez. He owns the screen from the very first scene, flipping the double-bird to an armed grocery-store security guard after getting fired from his stock-boy job. Otto’s overall dissatisfaction with life (his girlfriend leaves him for his ex-con friend; his pothead parents have given all their money to a TV evangelist) make him a perfect repo man candidate. He’s aimlessly wandering the streets when he’s picked up by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton, never better) and gets duped into joining the business. Alongside the ensuing car hijinks, there’s a punk crime spree, a cute girl involved with the United Fruitcake Outlet, a government conspiracy to get ahold of some dead aliens, and various people exploding.
It doesn’t make much (any) sense, but the movie’s own bizarre originality enabled it to resonate immediately: There still has never been anything like it. It’s anchored by the undeniable chemistry and friendship between Estevez’s and Stanton’s characters, and heightened by random bits of dialogue that became one-liners due to their absurd quotability: “Why so tense, guy?” “Let’s go get sushi… and not pay!” “People just explode. Natural causes.”