Out of Control

WHAT WE HAVE here is across between Road Warrior and Decline of Western Civilization a fact which is readily apparent about ten minutes into Repo Man. The Road Warrior bit opens the show as the film begins with a deranged scientist named J. Frank Parnell streaking down a barren L. A. highway in a 6-4 Chevy Malibu A policeman sets off after him on a motorcycle, pulls him to the side of the road, and inquires what is in the trunk, which seems to contain something hot--literally. I wouldn't look in there, Parnell intimates, thereby piquing the cop's curiosity Bad move, buster. As Parnell watches out of the rear-view mirror, the cop opens the trunk, which emanates weird x-ray emissions and zaps the poor guy to smithereens. J. Frank drives off into the California sunset.

The flip side of Repo Man's bizarreness emerges in the next few scenes, wherein we are introduced to the film's chief protagonist, a young suburban punk called Otto. Otto is rootless, aimless, unhinged--of this we are made painfully aware. We meet him first in a supermarket, where he is getting fired from his job, but the scene quickly shifts to outside an L.A. home where a gang of punks are into some serious slam-dancing action. The scene and music (solid hardcore) immediately conjure up the rage of Decline, the late great documentary about the L.A. punk scene. Now we find Otto in bed inside with some girl, spreading himself out in his underpants as if to say, "Gimme a blow job." The girl asks him to get her a beer, and he obliges only to find her, upon his return, furiously humping one of his punk friends. Otto is bummed.

Sound a little psychotic? That's the whole point of Repo Man, a movie which unabashedly aims to wallow in its own neurotic. Road Warrior or Decline--Repo Man, the first film by Mike Nesmith (yes, the guy from the Monkees), can't seem to decide which it wants to be, and so it is a mishmash of the two, which is not necessarily a bad thing, though it doesn't work here. Slap-dash road violence in the post-nuclear age (or pre-, as the case may be) and the pathetic tribulations of alienated punks--the two mix seamlessly in this offbeat satire of suburban L.A. life.

The film is somewhat interesting, especially in its manic depiction of life on the edge, of people about to go off the deep end, except the inside joke is obscured to the point of non-recognition. It's fun to watch punks, secret agents, and "repo" men--those guys who repossess cars from people behind on their payments--chase each other around; problem is, there's supposed to be a point to it all, and the viewer just doesn't get in the end.

The vacuous feeling that Repo Man ultimately engenders could perhaps have been averted. A plot exists here somewhere, mostly in the madcap race between government agents, two groups of thugs of all stripes, and the heroic repo men for the '64 Chevy commandeered by J. Frank Parnell. There is something slightly extraterrestrial about this car, and it interests the government radiation squad, beaded by metal-handed Agent Rogersz. The thieves, the no-good Rodreiguez brothers and a three-man gang of punk liquor store robbers, also want the car- for the money, apparently, as do the repo men, who are interested in a $20,000 commission for impounding the vehicle.

BUT THE craziness only starts there. Out of work and out of luck, Otto--who is played by Emilio Estevez, a dead ringer for his father. Martin Sheen--joins up with the repo men, getting a harsh initiation into the world of jimmying locks, seizing parked cars, and avoiding gunfire from disgruntled debtors. He thought he was tough, but here he meets some people who are really out on the fritz. Here's Bud (played by Harry Dean Stanton), a frazzled repovet who first brings Otto into the business--getting him to help him with a difficult heist--and then befriends him. Then there's Lite, a huge Black repo man, who has a predilection for emptying his revolver into dark houses. Finally, we meet Miller, who works in the repo men's lot and delivers cool lines like. "The more you drive, the less intelligent you are."

The net effect of this looniness is to drive you to the fallout shelter. The message is bleak--there is no hope for society, it is hopelessly insane, skewed. The medium is numbing--the director, Alex Cox, has spliced together a series of disjointed scenes into a rambling stream-of-consciousness denunciation of American society. The utter weirdness of society, the hopelessness of it all is insistently driven home to us in scene after scene, whether we're watching Otto shovel down his dinner from a can marked simply "Food," or watching Otto's punk friend Duke die after a shoot-out in a liquor store. "I know a life of crime led me to this fate. I blame society," he breathes in his final words.

WHAT IS the point Nesmith is driving at, except the absolute futility of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of a twenty-year-old, out-of-work punk? Is it that life is not worth living? Or that life can't be lived--that events are beyond our control? Clearly, this movie's makers wanted to let us in on some Inner Message, but the connection between the weirdness on screen and this message is never made clear. The opaqueness of Nesmith's vision in the end makes Repo Man--well...dell, with only a very cool hardcore soundtrack to sustain it. Mad Max--where are you when we need you?