Repo! The Genetic Opera.

"A week late for Halloween and 31 years after The Rocky Horror Picture Show," notes the Voice's J Hoberman, Repo! The Genetic Opera "arrives, wearing the cloak of midnight madness - not to mention black lipstick, cut-rate rococo threads, and all the accoutrements for life in a blasted necropolis. Based on a campy sci-fi/horror rock opera first staged in Toronto in 2002, Repo! is also an offshoot of the slash-mash-gash Saw franchise that's made gazillions for Lionsgate - it's directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, youthful helmer of Saws II, III and IV. No diabolical torture machines here, unless you read Repo! as a cautionary essay on the perils of the credit economy."

Updated through 11/8.

"With junky comic book-paneled sequences, musical numbers marked by graceless, strident tunes and generic chunk-chunk guitars, and a goth style drenched in gore, Bousman's rock-opera plays like a spastic, semi-incoherent extended music video for Type O Negative by way of Evanescence," writes Nick Schager.

"A helpful shortcut for negotiating the heaps of texts in this modern world: all attempts to give something familiar or antique a self-consciously edgy, gritty makeover can be, de facto, written off as terrible. Reassuring American songbook standards ('Over the Rainbow,' 'What a Wonderful World,' etc) performed in breakneck pop-punk style? Terrible. Movies set in centuries past where actual rules of comport are ignored and everyone acts like frisky undergraduates with ruffled collars? Terrible. Steampunk? Terrible, terrible, terrible." In short, for Nick Pinkerton, writing at indieWIRE, Repo! is "a cloacal sludge of Guignol, compared to which watching The Apple is a cultural experience on par with hearing Rigoletto sung at the old La Fenice."

"Cleverly conceived but poorly executed, this grab-fest of pop culture allusions doesn't have the narrative depth or musical style to make good on its promises," writes Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine.

"From the milieu to the characters, everything registers as a conceit, with the story building annoyingly to a blood feud that is more literal than Shakespearean," writes Ed Gonzalez in Slant. "Predicated on scant rhymes and loads of lame repetitions, the songs sound as if they were ghostwritten by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Give me torture porn any day."

"With an open ending that blatantly hopes that the audience will shell out their greenbacks for a sequel, Repo! tries very hard to rise to prominence as the work of a more edgy [Joss] Whedon clone," writes Simon Abrams in the New York Press. "By making [Anthony] Head the star of his show, Bousman clearly wants his cult to overlap with Whedon’s but fails to successfully splice his genres of choice together because of his piss-poor storytelling abilities."

Updates, 11/7: "Granted, there is a measure of originality in conceiving a horror-inflected rock opera on scientific and political themes, and no film starring Paris Hilton as a marginalized heiress whose poorly grafted face slides clean off her skull is entirely without its guilty pleasures," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times. "But when you live by the song, you die by the song."

"The film is bad - not good-bad, tacky-bad or fun-bad, just plain awful and nearly unwatchable," writes Mark Olsen in the Los Angeles Times.

"[C]omposer Terrance Zdunich skulks around as the quasi-narrator 'Graverobber,' Broadway's Sarah Brightman steals the show as a blind opera singer, and characters break into pummeling, industrialized ballads with names like 'Zydrate Anatomy,'" writes Sean O'Neal at the AV Club. "Oh, and Joan Jett pops up for a guitar solo, just because. It's remarkable that none of this proves exhausting, considering that Repo! rarely pauses to catch its breath."

IFC's Matt Singer lists "Five Flicks That Aspired to Cult Status."

For Filmmaker, André Salas talks with Bousman "about the twists and turns of getting his quirky horror musical made and into theatres."

Update, 11/8: Dave Itzkoff talks with Bousman for the NYT.

Posted by dwhudson at November 6, 2008 10:19 AM