Alex Cox film is an awfully colorful piece of pernicious nonsense
REPO CHICK (Alex Cox, 2009)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at Third St.
January 14-20, 1:35, 7:55, 10:00
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
Cult director Alex Cox, the mastermind behind REPO MAN and SID & NANCY, must have threatened the people running the 2009 Venice Film Festival with a barrage of Growler missiles to get this unwatchable, thoroughly embarrassing piece of pernicious nonsense to be included in the prestigious festival’s competition. This very strange, low-rent satire, made primarily on green screen, is an unbelievably lame supposedly comic thriller about Pixxi De La Chasse (Jaclyn Jonet), a disinherited debutante who gets a job working for a pair of repo men (Miguel Sandoval and Robert Beltran) after her father (Xander Berkeley) and aunt (Karen Black) cut her off because of her penchant for getting arrested. Upon learning of a million-dollar reward for repossessing a long-missing train, Pixxi is determined to prove to her family, her Euro-trash wannabe sidekicks (Danny Arroyo as 666, Jennifer Balgobin as Nevavda, and Zahn McClarnon as Savage Dave), and fellow repo woman and urban legend expert Lola (a nearly unrecognizable Rosanna Arquette) that she can take care of herself, even as terrorists threaten to blow up Los Angeles with Cold War-era Growler missiles if the game of golf isn’t banned. Or something like that. While it’s possible that Cox might have been striving to make one of those so-bad-it’s-good kind of movies, he’s failed at that as well, even dragging Chloe Webb into this disaster. REPO CHICK is in no way a sequel to REPO MAN, but it does bring down its legend ever so slightly, especially when it includes the word “pernicious” in the dialogue, a direct link to the great “pernicious nonsense” line delivered in its awesome predecessor. The lone saving grace is activist singer-songwriter Danbert Nobacon’s “Jamestown 2007” song that plays over the end credits, but you’re better off just checking that out on his record THE LIBRARY BOOK OF THE WORLD. (Nobacon makes a cameo in the film, while Cox illustrated the former Chumbawumba leader’s 2010 book THREE DEAD PRINCES.) REPO CHICK will screen at the IFC Center for one week before being released on Blu-ray and DVD February 8.