No matter what you think of this… uhh, trailer for “Repo Chick,” the sort-of quasi sequel to Alex Cox’s 1984 classic, “Repo Men,” — and there’s probably only two ways you can view it — it still must serve as some kind of cautionary tale.
And perhaps it begs the question: is this what happens when you’re stuck in director’s jail? Cox’s career kicked off rather excellently with the aforementioned cult-film classic (and he went on to have a seriously good ’80s run including “Sid & Nancy” (’86), “Straight to Hell” (’87) starring The Clash’s Joe Strummer, and the less-successful, but still-celebrated “Walker” (’87, which the Criterion Collection retroactively minted a few years ago).
But the ’90s were not kind to him and most of the crime thriller type B-movies he took on were all but forgotten. Things were looking up in 1997, when he was hired to direct “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” but Cox ran into “creative differences” with Hunter S. Thompson over the script treatment — documented in the documentary “Breakfast with Hunter” on the Criterion version of ‘Fear & Loathing’ that Terry Gilliam ultimately went on to direct.
So that blip of hope came and went and everything in between has pretty much gone unnoticed by critics and audiences alike (the filmmaker has done a substantial amount of TV in the interim too).
So now we’ve got the campy and ironic trailer for “Repo Chick.” Names in the film include Rosanna Arquette and well… Rosanna Arquette. The green-screen work in this is just fucking godawful and sure, advanced ironists are going to claim this is going to be awesome, but it doesn’t even look trainwreck awesome. It just looks well, really, really, really sad. We have a lot of affection for those aforementioned ’80s films, but this looks near pathetic. What happened dude? The release date on this one is TBD 2010 which is probably just a euphemism for straight-to-DVD.
