Prosperous Christmukah, my dear readers! I've got a special Christmas Eve post for you: the newest installment of our cult cinema showcase, this one spotlighting Repo! The Genetic Opera. Stay tuned this next couple of weeks; as a holiday gift to our readers, you should soon see the site positively inundated with roundtable interviews. In the meantime, let's take a look at the legacy of tonight's cult(ure) following.Then…: Underfunded and under-advertised by Lionsgate, this celluloid cyberpunk opera was shunted to red-headed stepchild status at the studio almost as soon as it received the greenlight. Even after its release, it never played in more than 11 theaters at once.
…And now: Okay, so those who haven’t seen it still tend to tune out as soon as you mention that Paris Hilton is in the cast—which is probably fair, considering the heiress’s cinematic track record. On the whole, however, the Hilton Factor has done surprisingly little to hinder Repo!’s success: despite its meager theatrical run, the film quickly gathered a rabid cult following and to this day boasts midnight showings across the country—many of them complete with shadowcasts of their very own. (In fact, Hilton herself even makes appearances on occasion.) Repo! is still relatively recent as far as cult films are concerned, granted, but it’s off to a pretty good start.
See it with: Machine Man protagonist Charles Neumann; any cybernetics enthusiast who you think might have taken the wrong message away from said novel.
Drug of choice: The Repo!-verse painkiller Zydrate, duh. Failing that, its real world equivalent—just about any hardcore prescription opiate—should suffice.
Predecessor to: Biopunk. Hey, you can’t start theorizing about the possibility of a designer-organ market until you’ve already conceptualized the organ-as-commodity, amirite?
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