10 Reasons REPO MAN Is the Best Car Movie Ever Made. Ever.
Every now and then a film production filters itself through the Hollywood mediocrity machine and comes out on the other side with its vision not only intact, but somehow greater than originally conceived. Sometimes this movie will define a decade, and on a rare occasion will transcend its time and resonate for years to come.
Thirty years ago, writer-director Alex Cox unleashed a clever little punk rock car film that no one expected very much from. The great car culture films all seem to feature detached, nomads traveling without purpose or end game. These films usually are trying to say something about a rootless culture that has somehow gone off the tracks using characters motivated mainly by obsession. Repo Man drags obsession through a dusty gutter until the only thing left is desperation.
10. HARRY DEAN STANTON
Sad-eyed Harry Dean brings a lifetime of love, hate, disappointment and wisdom to every minute of screen time in every film graced by his weathered face. Known mostly as a character actor, his career had already stretched through 200+ films, many of them the top classics of cinema. As Bud, the old repo pro to Emilio Esteves’ young upstart, Otto, Harry Dean effortlessly transforms all of us into ignorant bright-eyed punks looking to him not just for car boosting tips, but for his hard-won insights on life and survival in a predatory universe. His dark Impala cruiser is his pulpit and if you’re smart, you’ll secure your angst and your attitude and listen to what Harry Dean tells you.
9. LOS ANGELES
The City of the Angels was anything but, during principal photography in 1983. Today’s loft-living, art gallery strolling, designer bar drinking, downtown gentrified hipster lifestyle wasn’t yet even a dream in a condo developer’s head. DTLA was a wreck. Every street was skid row. Director Cox uses this bleak environment as a main character in the film.
Virtually every scene is two guys driving through semi-abandoned streets searching for cars to steal, usually after dark. And the Los Angeles dreamscape always looks best after dark. Harry Dean spits out his nihilistic philosophies as the dim streetlights flash past — you get the feeling he talks to himself a lot when he drives alone — and everyone eats at outdoor burger stands lit by sickening fluorescent lights. Los Angeles has always been the center of car culture, and the Repo Man subculture takes car obsession to its desperate limit.
8. ’64 CHEVY MALIBU
There’s something not right about the ’64 Chevy and its mumbling incoherent driver. When its repossession papers hit L.A. no one can believe the huge bounty offered. Every repo man in the city is on the lookout for the slow-moving mystery car. There are strange unmarked vans and G-men in dark sedans combing the city. Phones are being tapped. Rumors of flying saucers and dead aliens. People are disappearing in the seemingly aimless wake of the Chevy. In a direct homage to Samuel Fuller’s '50s paranoid Film Noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly, there’s something unspeakable in the trunk of the old Malibu. Something radioactive or somehow otherworldly. And the Feds want it.
7. THE SOUNDTRACK
Music is important to a car movie, and normally there’s some kind of countryfied guitar-banjo thing that gets turned up when the action gets hot. Otto is a punk rock outsider and his life stumbles forward to the tune of The Circle Jerks, Fear, and Suicidal Tendencies. L.A. greats, The Plugz, come up with reverb drenched secret-agenty instrumentals to underline the uncertainty and underlying menace of an NSA-type government conspiracy.
But it’s the Repo Man theme song that drives the film. Written and sung by Iggy Pop, Repo Man Theme is a classic of punk rock that defines it’s time. Backed by Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols on guitar and Nigel Harrison and the great Clem Burke from Blondie on bass and drums, the song starts like a hot wired engine, turning, turning, then BAM!, hitting on all eight and throttling us all toward oblivion. Brian DePalma’s Scarface was released at the same time. It’s a classic of crime, but let down badly by the '80s Giorgio Moroder soundtrack. Screened today, Scarface’s dated synth music almost ruins the film. But Repo Man sounds as vital and relevant today as it did 30 years ago as it drives the story through those darkened L.A. Noir streets.
6. THE CARS
The cars are all steel and chrome. No plastic. No high tech. Early on, Bud coaches Otto: “It helps to look like a detective…” — which means cheap suits and four-door sedans. All the repo men are living hand to mouth, and a flashy car isn’t in anyone’s budget. They are what most of us would’ve been driving in ’84, five or 10 years old and not particularly desirable machines. This is intentional.
This is why the film is real, in spite of its unreal storyline. Few of us can relate to driving a Lamborghini in a Gumball race across the desert or a Gulf Porsche 917 at Lemans. But we can all see ourselves jobless, in a bomber of a car doing what we have to do for survival. What the cars lack in flash, they make up for with truth.
5. L.A. RIVERBED
Repo Man didn’t have much of a budget. There wasn’t the technology to pull off CGI car chases featuring overproduced digital jumps that look pulled straight off of a game console. But there was the L.A. Riverbed. Used in countless crime films of the '50s, as well as earning a central role inThem! — the giant atomic ant movie — the L.A. river basin is probably the most recognizable landmark in the city. And the most beautiful.
The short chase with the enemy repo men, Rodriguez Brothers, is the scene everyone remembers. Bud in his big Impala and the Hermanos Rodriguez in their ’64 Falcon convertible dice, splash and climb the steeply banked walls. After Repo Man, every punk with four wheels under him tried to find an unlocked gate to get into that long dry concrete dragstrip. The riverbed and the 4th, 6th and 7th Street bridges are still used constantly in automotive ads, but the first thing to come to mind isn’t the latest Mazda or Toyota coupe, it’s that driving Repo Man theme song.
4. THE REPO MEN
Cocky, wise and rough, Bud, Oly, Miller and Lite know that there are no jobs and no opportunities except the ones you carve out yourself from an unwilling world. Sound familiar? Stalking and stealing cars? Sounds good. Better than the Hell of the fryer or the beige cubicle. The joy of a clever grab and the adrenaline rush that goes with it is the only difference between themselves and the poor saps out there who are behind on their payments and are about to lose their wheels.
When new kid Otto solos his first steal, a red Cadillac El Dorado, he’s instantly hooked on the life. Gliding down the boulevard, surrounded by soft leather, picking up the first chick he sees, there’s nothing else for him. If these guys weren’t legally boosting cars for financial institutions, who knows what they’d be up to? Probably stealing cars.
3. THE CRITERION COLLECTION
The great films of worldwide cinema are preserved and repackaged by Criterion in deluxe presentations. All the critical and artistic favorites from the beginning of moving pictures have a home here. Of the 780 films that criterion has judged to be the finest achievements in film making, just two could be considered car films. One is the great Two Lane Blacktop, the other is Repo Man. Congratulations Alex Cox. You belong there, rubbing elbows with Griffith, Fellini, Wells and Wenders.
2. THE REPO CODE
It’s 1984. There are no cell phones, no Internet. But there is The Repo Code. Bud recites it,“I shall not cause harm to any motor vehicle, or through inaction allow it to come to harm.” But those words are just words. The true Repo Code is everything that comes out of Bud’s mouth. Writer Cox peppers the film with funny and classic lines that belong on tee shirts, but for the most part are unprintable here at Driving Line. See the movie. Repeat the lines. Be somebody.
1. HARRY DEAN STANTON. AGAIN.
Essential and unclassifiable. Just like the film. What's your favorite Repo Man scene or quote? Haven't seen it, watch this if you need more convincing...
