The man steals the show as a deformed lothario who has a nasty habit of killing his lovers. But the real standout is Nivek Ogre of Skinny Puppy. Meanwhile Bill Mosely is obnoxious and all over the place, playing his seventh version of Chop-top while Paris Hilton is actually shockingly watchable as Amber Sweet, a heightened reality version of herself. Alexa Vega is strong as the cloistered daughter of the eponymous organ ripper and Anthony Stewart Head outdoes his Buffy singing, even as his role is too close to that of Giles. The rest of the cast is a bit of a mixed bag. Sarah Brightman is also quite good in a small roll that is entirely divorced from her signature turn in Phantom of the Opera. Sorvino is fascinating to watch when he is let loose and he has a singing voice to rival any star of stage. Paul Sorvino is brilliant fun as the patriarch who controls the world but finds himself unable to defeat cancer. The cast, made up of a bizarre collection of geek favorites, musicians and world famous opera singers is almost weirder than the movie's central conceit. It is a shame that he is no longer attached to the Hellraiser relaunch. Though the bloodletting is vicious, it never spills over into elaborate rape fantasy. I find it repulsive and saddening, but here, Bousman has found that perfect mix between sexy and grotesque. Normally I am one to shy away from sexualized violence. He takes what he learned making Saw II-IV and pushes in into overdrive as he uses it to skewer one satirical target after the next. Repo! is often tremendously bloody with sanguine spilling left and right, often directly on top of naked flesh. Darren Lynn Bousman has made a name for himself as a go-to guy for over the top, operatic gore and he doesn't shy away from it here. Starlets don't forget to wear panties, they forget to sew on their new faces. People have designer spines and get upgrades on their bodies when they go in for maintenance on their artificial organs. Picking up where the ultimate consumers of Romero's shopping malls left off, Repo! makes for a brutal satire of consumer culture where human flesh is a commodity bought and sold with government approval. It cuts together the pieces of our collective pop culture consciousness the same way that the antagonists cut together new forms for their bodies. Genres and archetypes are thrown up against one another and mashed together with reckless abandon mixing Grand Guignol with Sondheim and Disney with Faces of Death. It skips and jumps from one homage to the next, cribbing notes from Rocky Horror in one scene before moving on to Rigoletto in the next. There is so much whimsy in this film that it almost becomes an absurdist fairytale. The story, told entirely through song, details the intersecting secrets of people living in a world where a mysterious virus has caused random organ failure and forced people to resort to leasing cloned organs, at a very high price. Repo! The Genetic Opera definitely falls into the latter category. It simply has to take you somewhere you have never been, and hopefully throw your mind through a few loops along the way. This type of movie doesn't have to make sense in the same way that a traditional film does. The other way in which a movie can succeed is with ideas. This is the route that most critics look for when giving a positive review. It can demonstrate a mastery of technical and thematic areas and create an emotional response in the viewer. OneĀit can have a fully realized plot that works to explain some larger subtextual moral. There are two ways in which a movie can succeed.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |