I suppose it's possible to roughly triangulate it by comparing other things - pretty much everybody's first thought would probably be The Rocky Horror Picture show, mostly because that musical's glam rock and this musical's goth have DNA in common, and both owe a strong debt to horror cinema, but the gulf between the two films is still pretty extreme. Repo! The Genetic Opera is a true original, a film that feels more or less unprecedented. Not so small that the film wasn't able to develop a fairly ravenous cult, though, and it's not even slightly surprising that this was the case, nor hard to see what the cult was on about. And that plus Bousman's good standing with Lionsgate, was enough to get the project off the ground late in 2007, for an ultimate 2008 release that is notable primarily for how extraordinarily small and noncommittal it was. Somewhere in all that, he and Smith and Zdunich agreed to develop a Repo! movie, starting with a 10-minute proof-of-concept short that Bousman directed in 2006. Just like that, Bousman became the temporary keeper of the enormously profitable Saw franchise, further directing Saw III in 2006 and Saw IV in 2007 (neither of which he wrote).
This went from being a weakness to a strength in short order, when Bousman rewrote it to become the 2005 release Saw II, which he also directed. And Bousman was about to become kind of a biggish deal, thanks to his screenplay The Desperate, which was being dismissed as "too close to Saw".
Now, one of its iterations along the way was directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, a recent film school graduate at the time.
And whatever else one might say about the movie, I offer the unmitigated praise that it never once feels in any way stagebound: indeed, it's so free-floating and energetic as a cinematic object that I truthfully can't quite figure out what a stage version of this material might possibly look like. The film was born as a stage musical developed by Darren Smith & Terrance Zdunich over a period of years the first version was staged in 2002, the last in 2005. But I cannot imagine someone being bored, or indifferent. I can imagine almost any possible reaction to the film: I can imagine someone feeling incredible passion for the movie and turning into a raving cultist on the spot I can imagine someone being repulsed within seconds and treating the whole thing like the most appalling trash. Here's the one thing that is unambiguously true about Repo! The Genetic Opera: it sure is a hell of a lot of movie. A review requested by Kelleson Dale, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.ĭo you have a movie you'd like to see reviewed? This and other perks can be found on our Patreon page!
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