Repo Man sequel starts its engines

In what bible scholars agree is the third sign of the coming apocalypse (the election of George W. Bush and the success of the Jonas Brothers being the first two), Alex Cox has started filming Repo Chick, the sequel to his 1984 cult classic, Repo Man. For those of us who came of age in the 1980s (a.k.a. your parents), that film expressed something profound about how fucked up American culture was in the midst of the Reagan years. Part of that film's genius is that it makes fun of those ordinary fucking people at whom Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) so memorably sneers, but it also mocks the faux-punk posing of Otto (Emilio Estevez). It sneers at irony almost as much as it sneers as sincerity. Fucking genius.

As slashfilm.com notes, Cox plans to put the sequel in the contemporary context of subprime mortgages and the credit crisis, which ought to make for a nice twist. "The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations…children” Oh, Alex, you crazy guy. (On another note, our feature seems more and more timely this week.)

But you might wonder what finally spurred Cox to get off his ass and make the sequel. Our pet theory: He was inspired by listening to our late, much-loved film podcast, which paid homage to Repo Man in its title Plate o' Shrimp:

"A lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconciousness."