Repo Man Tagged Articles at Cinematical

No, we're not talking about folks whose immigration status is in question, but actual visitors from another planet. This weekend marks the release of District 9, in which an alien race is forced to live as second class citizens in slum-like conditions on Earth. To commemorate the occasion I'm taking a look back at seven of my favorite cinematic aliens.

Alien Nation
This 1988 flick seems like the perfect one to start with since the plot reminds me so much of District 9. The film is set in the far flung future world of 1991, just a few years after a space ship filled with escaped alien slaves landed in California. Known for their large spotted craniums and their tendency to dissolve in salt water, the aliens are referred to as newcomers and their assimilation into the Los Angeles population has been difficult. Since the newcomers are not particularly welcome they have become America's newest oppressed minority.

James Caan plays police detective Matthew Sykes, whose partner is killed in the line of duty. Sykes' is assigned to work with Detective Sam Francisco (played by Mandy Patinkin), the first newcomer officer to be promoted to detective. This is basically a buddy cop film with science fiction trappings, so the somewhat racist Sykes eventually warms up to his extraterrestrial partner and they join forces to prevent a highly addictive drug from being sold to the newcomer population. The film inspired a 1989 television series on Fox that lasted only one season but in turn gave rise to five made-for-TV movies. According to our sister site TV Squad, the show is about to be reimagined for the SyFy channel.

Alex Cox has a really crowded business card: Cult Filmmaker. Fallen from Grace. Hollywood Outsider. Looking for a Comeback. In the 1980s, he was a Next Big Thing after Repo Man (1984), which is undoutedly the greatest movie ever made about paranoia, cars, punks and aliens in Los Angeles. He quickly followed that with Sid and Nancy (1986), a dizzying biopic of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and his deranged girlfriend Nancy Spungen. That film not only earned a cult following, but also got a fair measure of mainstream critical recognition.

Afterward, Cox's career struggled to regain the same kind of momentum. His next film, Straight to Hell (1987), was almost universally dismissed as an exercise in weird, but his fourth film, Walker (1988), was a hit among European film buffs, and it was recently bestowed with a high-class Criterion DVD release. Since then his films had very sporadic distribution and some of them remain very difficult to see, including the acclaimed Highway Patrolman. And the ones that are available on DVD tend not to generate much enthusiasm. But Cox is out there trying, and according to a recent Village Voice interview, he hopes to return to the concept of repo men.

This whole comic sequel thing is really getting quite big. If you can't make a continuation happen on-screen, or on television, just make a comic. Joss Whedon has been continuing the Buffy franchise through classic comic graphics, and now Repo Man is finally getting a graphic sequel that will hit shelves at the end of next month called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday. To get the details on the follow-up to the ultra-weird '80s cult classic, EW recently talked to the flick's writer/director, Alex Cox.

Apparently, the story was originally going to be a cinematic sequel, but the talks went nowhere. Then, Cox was going to get it made on his own, and even talked to Willem Dafoe, Harry Dean Stanton, and of course, Emilio Estevez to take part. Obviously, that didn't come to be either. Enter: the graphic approach with Chris Bones.

Cox says all the characters in Waldo are "a coded version of somebody in Repo Man." However, he won't say for sure if Waldo is Otto. He describes the sequel about Waldo this way: "He's been away on a journey in a car for 10 years and just returned. He thinks he's only been gone for the evening. Now, he may indeed be Otto. He may have been transmogrified on the way back into Waldo. Or that may have happened to several people at the same time."

Yeah, still confusing. You can try to wrap your head around the new story on March 31.

I've been sitting here for a while now, staring at the blinking cursor on my blank screen, trying to think of something to say about the collector's edition--out this week--of the 1984 Alex Cox film, Repo Man. What do you say about a film that is quoted, still to this very day and largely unknowingly, by young punk wannabes, suburban potheads, and 30-something film nerds, but probably would elicit a "what?" from this decade's stock of yawning teenagers? Let alone that Repo Man couldn't get made in this decade, or the next, or the next after that. It's too political, satirical, and absurd; it reaches way beyond any current measuring stick we have for political, satirical, absurdist films--beyond Mean Girls, beyond Election, beyond whatever's dubbed the newest "piercing look at today's youth." Bah. Piercing look my ass.

Maybe I'll use some kind of joke for an introduction, something political and absurd, you know, just to mirror what I feel about this film? How about this: "So, a British guy wearing a headband and the inventor of the neutron bomb are sitting around one afternoon watching clips from the film Repo Man..." That's the start of a pretty great joke, no? Except, right then when you were thinking, "Hey, great joke!" I  was chuckling because what you don't know is that the British guy is director Alex Cox and the inventor of the neutron bomb is Sam Cohen, inventor of the neutron bomb, and yes, they really are sitting around watching Repo Man--in fact, they're part of a bonus featurette on the disc. Cohen is relaxing in a barcalounger, his feet up.   He wonders aloud in a gravelly voice, "What's that Emilio Estevez--that is his name?--up to these days?" Alex Cox doesn't know. He thinks Emilio might be trying his hand at directing, but he's not sure.

That's so obviously punk rock, right? A winking put-on by Cox for the DVD release, the disheveled scientist an unwitting stand-in for The Man. You think, "Poor guy's gonna get eviscerated by this aging punk rocker!" But it turns out that Sam Cohen called Alex Cox--essentially invited himself over--because next to Dr. Strangelove, Repo Man is his favorite film.