If you are a regular reader of blogs, you might have noticed the proliferation of “punk” suffixes in recent months. A December 2008 entry on Boing Boing spoke of “atompunk”, a Dutch movement fetishizing the atomic space age of the 1950s and ’60s. The entry was posted at a time when steampunk - a style based on gears, steam, and the Victorian future that never was - had reached its nader. Of course, cyberpunk, the bleak ’80s science fiction subgenre, was the granddaddy of both, and others besides. (Sandalpunk, anyone?)

So here’s Repo: The Genetic Opera, which proclaims itself “biopunk.” This is a legitimate subgenre that includes fine films like Gattaca (1997) and books like Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003.) But Repo takes biopunk to mean cyberpunk and steampunk mushed together with some horror-flick splatter. The complex questions raised by genetics and biotechnology are tossed up without thought. The film’s references and influences are many.

Repo began life as a stage musical (by Darren Smith & Terrance Zdunich) clearly written in the vein of The Rocky Horror Show and Little Shop of Horrors. While these productions retained their theatrical camp in the move to celluloid, Repo is akin to Sweeney Todd or, say, Rent: too deliberately ironic to be disposable fun.

There’s also the weakness of the material. This really is an opera, with every exchange set to music. We must remember Voltaire’s quip, ” Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.” There’s no subtlety or double meanings to the dialogue/ verses, as characters describe how they feel. (A dramatic no-no.) In fairness, the musical arrangements are passable, hitting on an Evanescence/ Rasputina groove with grinding guitars and epic strings and choirs.

For a 98 min. film there is an inordinate amount of set-up and exposition. The plot proper is slow to start, and the final set piece drags. What’s in the middle? Nada. It’s all wrapper and no filling.

Rating:

Starring: Anthony Stewart Head, Alexa Vega, Paul Sorvino

Directed By: Darren Lynn Bousman

Written by: Darren Smith, Terrance Zdunich

Repo is set in the near future, where Blade Runner screens hover past Tim Burton mansions next to Michael Jackson graveyards. Worldwide organ failure leads to a demand for transplants, which in turn leads to demand for elective surgery and designer painkillers. Feeding the addition is Geneco, whose financing allows repossession of organs not paid for. Would widespread inability to pay the loans lead to subprime organ failures? One wonders.

Anyway, Nathan (Anthony Stewart Head) is a loving yet overprotective father to Shilo (Alexa Vega), and also the Repo Man. Oh, cruel dichotomy! He blames himself for his wife Marni’s death, and treats his daughter for the same blood condition as crippled Marni.

Nathan is employed by the head of Geneco, Rotti Largo (Paul Sorvino), who loved and lost Marni back in the day. (”The day” is exactly 17 years ago, you’ll be reminded.) Alarmed by the prospect of his three grotesque children inheriting Geneco, Rotti seeks another heir.

Other players include Amber Sweet (Paris Hilton), Rotti’s daughter, addicted to “street zygate” and surgery, as well as Blind Meg (Sarah Brightman), a soprano with cybernetic eyes, Geneco’s spokesperson and star of the ongoing Genetic Opera.

The performances are all right, with everyone throwing themselves headfirst into their roles. Anthony Stewart Head, veteran of the Buffy’s musical episode Once More with Feeling, plays sweet dad and gravely-voiced monster equally well. Alexa Vega is cute, while Paris Hilton and Sarah Brightman’s artificial selves slide into this world perfectly. A weak link is Terrance Zdunich as the Graverobber, a narrator who’s too self-consciously stagy. All bit parts are fine, with plenty of flailing and bleeding. Such a ham-tastic cast is rarely assembled, so it seems like a missed opportunity given what limited roles they have to work in.

In the film’s concluding moments, Shilo sings that she is “free at last” and can go anywhere she chooses. This limits her to three or four sets, presumably. Likewise, the film is not destined to live on any place but fans’ hard drives. The midnight screenings for which it was so explicitly prepared will be few. Cult films achieve their designation after flopping with mainstream audiences because they are too strange, smart, and/ or subversive. In flashing “cult status” on its lacy, effete sleeve rather than earning it, Repo: The Genetic Opera can safely be regarded as mall punk.