Repo Man: Punk, Aliens, and the Great Los Angeles Nowhere

Wed, 29 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Some films arrive fully formed with nowhere obvious to have come from. Repo Man, Alex Cox’s 1984 debut, is one of them — a science-fiction comedy about the tow-truck economy, financed partly by former Monkee Michael Nesmith, released by Universal to almost total public indifference, and then rescued from the void by a soundtrack album that outsold the picture many times over. Forty years on it plays like a message in a bottle from a Los Angeles that has since been demolished: the flat industrial edge-lands east of downtown, the liquor stores and vacant lots, the hum of a superpower with a nuclear hangover.

Alex Cox - vo.rs

Repo Man: Punk, Aliens, and the Great Los Angeles Nowhere