The premise of Repo! The Genetic Opera is fascinating. It's 50 years in the future, and an organ-failure epidemic has pushed humans to the brink of extinction. An organ manufacturing company called Geneco rises, and its founder, Rotti Largo, becomes a savior by mass producing these organs. Not only does Geneco provide organs, they also provide a highly addictive and exceedingly rare anesthesia, Zydrate, to go with it. People become addicted to surgery and swap their organs for "designer parts," which can range from eyeballs to faces to intestines. If you can't afford to pay Geneco back, they send the Repo [pronounced Reap-oh] Man after you to "repossess" your organs, aka slaughtering you alive legally.

The musical is filled with strange and morbid characters that each have a story to tell. Unfortunately, the musical never fleshes out some of the more curious players, and when the curtains fall, you're never really left with any closure. The Repo Man is probably the center of this whole film, and while the actor who plays Repo is an excellent actor, I'm not so sure why he's the center of the story. The stories of the 3 heirs to the Geneco dynasty are barely touched upon, and we know absolutely nothing about the Graverobber, the drug dealer and narrator of the story. While they are ancillary characters, they appear often enough in strange situations that beg for an explanation. Most of the background story is illustrated comic-book style, and scattered across the film. We learn about another interesting character, Blind Mag, mostly through comic book pages, which is very disappointing, since Sarah Brightman was actually really, really good as the enslaved company opera singer.


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My bad habit of reading film summaries before I watch movies basically ruins plot surprises and twists, so I basically knew the whole storyline of the musical before I even watched the trailer. Pouring through Youtube and the Repo! site, I overly sampled the "hit songs," which then left the rest of Repo tediously repetitive and predictable. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the film [despite having my eyes covered about 60% of the film because I can't stand blood, guts, and gore] Besides the need for fleshing out the characters, the lyrics for most of the songs were overtly simple, and tended to repeat itself. Sometimes the songs ran too long, or the scene dragged. There is only so long you can watch Paris Hilton prance around in bondage before you start wondering if there is any acting she can do realistically besides porn. The film was also overly gory, and tried to fit way too many goth, morbid, PVC bondage, nurse/doctor/surgery-blood-splattering, high-tech-industrial apocalyptic, steam punk, necrophiliac, Victorian, and etc themes into 1 film. It's like they tried to take every subculture that resides outside prep, hippie, geek, and hipster, smash it into a gothic mess, and pour copious amounts of blood on it.



I really liked the music though, a very nice mix of industrial and goth instrumentals. Besides the blood splattering, I love the costumes, and have been eying Blind Mag's Chromaggio costume for Halloween ever since I had the finale spoiled for me by youtube. [Yeah, not really goth enough to be wearing that kind of stuff in everyday-public, thank you very much. Don't have the guts to. Plus I'd scare the crap out of everyone I hang out with on a normal basis here. Yay for closet-gothness, without the morbid tendencies.]