FROM THE VAULT: 1984
Repo Man
Starring: Emilio Estevez, Harry Dean Stanton
Director: Alex Cox
The film: Conventional cinema wisdom tells us that The Breakfast Club defines 1980s American youth culture. Well, if you spent the decade chatting with your peers about 'feelings', I suppose it was. But if you, like many who came of age in the Reagan era, spent most days steeped in hideous nihilism, wondering not if but when nuclear Armageddon would come, Repo Man more adequately sums up the spirit of that angry and confused decade.
The plot is a simple one: a Chevy Malibu with a dead extraterrestrial in its trunk is being driven around the desert by J. Frank Parnell (Fox Harris), a ranting scientist dying of radiation poison ('Radiation...you hear the most outrageous lies about it.') Meanwhile, Otto (Emilio Estevez) is a disgruntled young white suburban punk tricked into becoming a repo man - a professional car repossessor - by Bud (Harry Dean Stanton, right), a dangerously hip beatnik noir with a healthy loathing for the common man. The car is being sought by the government, a group of rival repo men, and even a crooked TV evangelist. The plot pretty much comes together from here.