...It's 4 A.M., do you know where your car is?Repo Man (1984)
Otto Maddox (Emilio Estevez), an alienated young punk rocker living in mid-1980s Los Angeles, is fired from his menial, supermarket stock clerk job for talking back to his boss. Shortly afterwards, he finds out that his pot-smoking, ex-hippie parents have donated his entire savings account to a popular, but sleazy, televangelist. Leaving home and broke, Otto gets a job almost by accident with the disingenuously named "Helping Hand Acceptance Corporation," a small-time automobile repossession agency, where he is mentored by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) a seasoned repo man who teaches the often hazardous profession.
Soon, Bud, Otto and competing repo men all over town are searching for a 1964 Chevrolet Malibu from New Mexico, ludicrously overvalued at $20,000; this vehicle, unknown to them, contains something mysterious and dangerously powerful in its trunk, also sought by a strange female FBI agent, Agent Rogersz (Susan Barnes) and her staff. The film draws on the experiences of Alex Cox, who worked briefly as a repo man in Los Angeles, but soon deviates into the surreal with aliens, the CIA, televangelism, punk rocker thieves and other strange characters and situations, all amid a long string of hilarious running gags and almost-impossible coincidences.
Favorite Line from the movie:
J. Frank Parnell: Ever been to Utah? Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year. They ought to have them, too. When they canceled the project it almost did me in. One day my mind was full to bursting. The next day - nothing. Swept away. But I'll show them. I had a lobotomy in the end.
Otto: Lobotomy? Isn't that for loonies?
Parnell: Not at all. Friend of mine had one. Designer of the neutron bomb. You ever hear of the neutron bomb? Destroys people - leaves buildings standing. Fits in a suitcase. It's so small, no one knows it's there until - BLAMMO. Eyes melt, skin explodes, everybody dead. So immoral, working on the thing can drive you mad. That's what happened to this friend of mine. So he had a lobotomy. Now he's well again.
