Repo! The Genetic Opera

Shit, you don’t need me to tell you if you’ll like this or not. It has the same director as Saw (and Saw II, and Saw III, and, er, however many more films are in that franchise), and stars, among many other colorful actors, Anthony Stewart Head, Ogre from Skinny Puppy, Paris Hilton, and Sarah Brightman. And it’s a musical. Having read all that, I imagine that either you are right now adding it to your Netflix queue, you are recoiling in horror from the screen, or your head has exploded. No matter which of those groups you fall into, you probably don’t need me to tell you if you’ll like it.

But, OK, I ought to say something. This film is, as the above synopsis suggests, one big kettle of weirdshit. Parts of it work better than others. Everyone hams it up tremendously, so the acting is what it is, which is neither good nor bad. Even Paris Hilton does an OK job. The songs include some decent pieces, some earworms, and a fair number of clunkers (the entire film might have been better if the “Seventeen” sequence had been left out. They could’ve snuck Joan Jett in somewhere else, really). All in all, it shows a certain amount of care and design, but that has absolutely no relevance on who will like it. This film is aimed at a very particular demographic and will please them, and probably enter into cult-classicdom through them. As a ridiculous, hammy piece lobbed at a particular culture, I can kinda respect this one, even if I’m lukewarm to it personally.

See also: IMDB, Wikipedia.