Cult-comedy, Repo Man, celebrated its 40th anniversary in March of 2024. This science-fiction road film, written and directed by Alex Cox, is postmodern pastiche and a seminal entry in punksploitation. A tongue in cheek critique of Reagan’s America with a protagonist that doesn’t fit in the straight world during troubled times. Where everyone is fighting over scraps and crime seems to be the secret ingredient, but choosing to walk the seamy side could get you mixed up with space aliens.
After graduating from UCLA in the early 80s, Alex Cox and a few friends formed Edge City Productions to create low-budget feature films. He wrote the script for Repo Man as a satirical commentary on Reaganomics and a culture of excess and conformity. Essentially the beginning of our modern day ending. The film highlights the malaise of an 18-year-old punk in 1984, Otto Maddox. A young man that keeps getting in his own way while trying to forge his path. Otto’s parents are stoned hippies that sold out his future and are hypnotized by televangelists. He struggles to hold a regular 9-5, has a bum love life, and delinquent friends doomed to end up in jail or dead. Played by Emilio Estevez, Otto gets recruited by Harry Dean Stanton’s character, Bud, a repo agent playing by his own rules in the intense world of repossession. Cox once said in an interview that the movie “was based on my own personal Los Angeles horrors and the tutelage of Mark Lewis, a car repossessor and my neighbour in Venice.” Soon Otto is entangled in a hunt for a 1964 Chevy Malibu with a UFO cult, a lobotomized mad scientist, and a secret government agency.
Perhaps one reason the film is so beloved in the cult sense is because of how brutally relatable it can be even while having such a wacky plot. You watch Otto get hit with a devastating wave of existentialism, realizing how mundane the game of life is. Of course you’re gonna hop in the spaceship when the aliens arrive! Who doesn’t wanna be saved from the milquetoast roles of liminal suburbia?
Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday
In the mid-90s, Alex Cox created a script for a Repo Man sequel titled “Otto’s Hawaiian Holiday”. Universal Pictures owned the rights to any official sequel, so the lead character’s name had to be changed to “Waldo”. Cox was finalizing a deal to begin filming in 1997, but it collapsed when Emilio Estevez pulled out of the project, saying that the script did not make sense. The script remained on Alex’s website where Christopher Bones of Gestalt Publishing stumbled across it and reached out about a graphic novel adaptation. Illustrated by Bones and Justin Randall, Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was published as a quasi-sequel in 2008.
The story picks up 10-13 years where the Repo Man film left off. Otto Waldo returns from his space travels in the 64’ Chevy Malibu with no memory of where he’s been. It’s now the grimy Clinton-era, a culture choked with hotline scams and chain emails. His parents’ home in Edge City is now a rundown boarding house. Everything is different but still kind of the same? No longer a disaffected youth, Waldo is just another lost soul in the welfare-to-workfare 90s and gets a job in telemarketing flimflams. A cog in the machine is doomed to become a mark, and it doesn’t take long for Waldo to receive a sketchy call offering him a free holiday in Hawaii. But every attempt made to get away to paradise is thwarted by spam-artist bureaucracy and bizarre events. Eventually Waldo realizes that Los Angeles is an experimental self-maintaining prison constructed by Martians.
Though the illustrations are ambiguous, the reader will recognize the supporting characters as they were meant to be played by the original actors of Repo Man. From his girlfriends to his coworkers and even his fellow boarders. The faces are familiar, but they are different people, including Waldo himself. Rather than trying to make sense of it all, he holds onto the hope of going on that Hawaiian vacation.
You can purchase a PDF of Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday on globalcomix.com.
A Texas Tale of Treason
As mentioned before, the Waldo script had been left untouched on the director’s website for years, prior to the graphic novel adaptation. In the early Aughts, a group of old punks from Texas reached out to Cox with the idea of making a low-to-no budget version of Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday. With Alex’s permission, the motorcycle mechanic Stuart Kincaid with his team of Antstuie Productions, set out to honor the beloved 84’ cult film with a DIY sequel made by punks for the punks. Over the course of 3 years of filming, anything that could go wrong did go wrong. Beyond the crew being hassled by cops and blue-collar scheduling conflicts, delays crop up from dodging hurricanes Rita and Katrina. There are casting setbacks, and actors are paying their own way as a labor of love. Kincaid was selling off rare motorcycle parts to continue funding the project and even destroyed part of his own house to build the sets for his vision of Waldo. But Antstuie Productions soldiered on with their collective passion until issues between Kincaid and Cox reached a boiling point. Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday was a hair shy of being completed when Cox rescinded the rights to his script, and the film is to never see the light of day.
That’s when Antstuie decided to make a documentary out of their tumultuous experience to salvage something from their effort. A Texas Tale of Treason -or- How I Learned to HATE the Bomb with a tagline that reads “The ALMOST Making of Waldo…” Featuring clips from the film and interviews from cast and crew, it seems as if Antstuie’s Waldo were to play out exactly as Gestalt Publishing’s graphic novel later would. Several members of punk bands like The Hickoids, Angry Samoans, and The Rhythm Pigs give their accounts of the roller coaster ride that was the filming of Waldo. Kincaid lays the documentary out as a cautionary tale to diehard Repo Man fans and anyone with interest in micro-budget filmmaking. Hopefully inspiring a renewed disgust for the nature of the Hollywood beast and its demi-gorgons of entertainment. Perhaps the biggest takeaway is not to meet your heroes and to think outside the standard definitions of punk rock. Alex Cox declined to be interviewed for the documentary and never publicly gave his side of the story. A Texas Tale is an honest representation of the blood, sweat, and guts that the crew put into this project and the devastation of being left hanging out to dry.
In 2024, there doesn’t seem to be any simple way to view the documentary. No online video, no downloading, streaming or purchasing. It seems as if A Texas Tale of Treason has become just as lost of a film as Antstuie’s Waldo’s Hawaiian Holiday. The trailer for the documentary can still be found online and the YouTube user “ant stuie” seems to be the only online presence of the original production company. But the account offers several clips from the documentary and raw footage of Waldo.
Repo Chick
While Alex Cox shares the rights to Repo Man with Universal Pictures, neither can produce a true sequel without the other’s consent. Twenty-four years after the original film, he writes and directs a “spiritual sequel” in 2009 called Repo Chick. A cynical exacerbation of the 2008 economic crisis. In an interview with ScreenDaily, Cox admitted to being inspired by how things had gotten worse.
“The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations … children.”
Repo Chick utilizes surreal green screen backgrounds and animations. An aesthetic reminiscent of Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly that gives the post-apocalyptic satire a gritty, contrast blown appeal. It may have even inspired the art direction of 2023’s popular Barbie movie. Though Repo Chick makes no references to Repo Man, Cox was able to recruit a lot of the same actors from the 1984 movie. Olivia Barash, Zander Schloss, Jennifer Balgobin, Del Zamora, Tom Finnegan, Eddie Velez, Biff Yeager, and Miguel Sandoval return in Repo Chick, but in completely different roles. Any fan of the original will find these familiar faces in the corners of the film a real treat. The goofy brute in Duke’s punk gang, Archie, now plays repo management that idolizes John Wayne and has the cool attitude of the character Bud. Once again, familiar faces but very different people.
The plot follows Pixxi, a spoiled heiress of a wealthy family in LA. After yet another tabloid scandal, her family disinherits her. To reclaim her fortune, Pixxi is expected to get a real job on the same day her car is repossessed, and her entourage begins to fall away. That’s when Pixxi learns what a booming and intense industry repossession can be during times of widespread credit collapse. As a thrill-seeker, she is immediately successful as a repossession agent. Now gainfully employed, she tries to reconcile with her family, only to find they have given her inheritance to televangelists. Determined to rebuild her wealth, Pixxi finds a wanted poster promising a $1,000,000 reward for the successful return of an antique train with a glowing caboose. She tracks the elusive California Zephyr with several prominent figures aboard and joins them on a tour of a proposed energy pipeline–but actually, they’re eco-terrorists! Threatening to use weapons of mass destruction unless the sport of golf is banned nationwide (I fully support this) , and all members of the federal government become vegan.
Repo Chick references with a sneering humor the cult-like figures of organized religion, local politics, and the prioritizing of luxury for the elite over sustainability for the masses. Like a snake biting its own tail, everybody repeats the cycle of just doing what they think they’re supposed to be doing. Simulacrum trapped in a tabletop experiment, it’s the same story just a different dimension.
Looking for the Joke with the Microscope
Alex Cox returns for another plate of shrimp by announcing in early 2024 that he’s directing yet another sequel. Repo Man 2: The Wages of Beer is considered a reimagining and a continuation of the original 1984 film. Backed by Buffalo 8 Productions, it’ll star Kiowa Gordon as the lead role of Otto. Returning from his 40-year-long intergalactic joyride, Otto finds himself in a modern timeline ruled by internet, social media, and hi-tech scamming. The film promises to “deliver an enthralling mix of punk energy, existential comedy, and unconventional storytelling, navigating the chaotic world of repo men into a new age of nuclear brinkmanship and driverless cars.” Filming is set to begin in the summer of 2024.
Alex Cox’s Repo Man and the trilogy of “non sequels” fit together perfectly 40 years later. They contain running gags and themes within themselves and relating to each other. When paralleled to reality, everything is vaguely familiar but a slightly different flavor as society really is just that boring and predictable. Yet they find the absurd humor of being doomed to repeat history, which I suppose is the punchline to the cosmic joke. Lastly, the Repo Man multiverse is a credit to the desperation of the malcontents and the endless search for meaning. We can all only hope to be offered a ride in a time machine shaped like a 64’ Chevy Malibu.
– K. Ratticus
*Originally printed in Cathode Ray Mission #3 Fall of 2024
