The shadowcast performance of Repo! The Genetic Opera, at the Music Box Theater on Friday. The players are a company called the 90 Day Delinquents

Repo!  The Genetic Opera is a weird kind of legendary.  It started as a stage play/musical, and gradually mutated into a 10-minute short in 2006, and then finally was expanded into a full-length feature in 2008, and released by Lionsgate.  It’s a strange combination of horror and musical, which work better together than I would have imagined.  

Interesting facts:

• According to Wikipedia, it holds the record for the most songs put together into a single film, with a total of 64.
• Bill Moseley, better known as Chop-Top in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part II and for his work in Rob Zombie’s horror films, plays Luigi Largo, a knife-wielding psychopath
• Ogre, a.k.a Kevin Oglevie, a.k.a. the voice of Skinny Puppy, plays Pavi Largo, and wears the skin of a dead woman attached to his head with clips.
• World-famous soprano Sarah Brightman, who gets her work pimped by the likes of PBS, plays Blind Mag, and gouges out her own eyeballs.
• It is probably the single coolest thing that Paris Hilton has ever participated in.

The DVD has been out since January, and there are still occasional screenings around the country.   I was pleased to find out that there was going to be one here in Chicago at the Music Box Theater. 

Not only that, but it was also billed as having a shadowcast performance as well.  

Shadowcast, as in getting the Rocky Horror Picture Show treatment.

Now, back in my high school days, I was often known to attend the shadowcast performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Metro Twin Theater in Melbourne, Florida, so I do have a little experience with this sort of thing.  I even played the part of Rocky in one performance at the University of Central Florida, back in 1995.   That was twenty years after that movie was released.

I figured that Rocky Horror was the first and last words in shadowcast.  I’d seen people try to do it with other films, but without much success.  

But I have to say, the shadowcast performance of Repo! has forced me to reconsider that position.  

Before Friday’s performance, I had never seen Repo!, but had heard about it from various sources.  And now, I’m still not sure I understand the story in the film, but man, was it fun.  It was like the good old days.  

I was suprised that so many people in the theater knew the movie word for word.  After all, this was a film that has never seen a wide release, and was only released on DVD a few months ago.   But many of the people at the screening could sing along with every song in every scene.

Zydrate is *supposed* to come in a little glass vial.

Many people showed up in costume, and there was a brief costume contest (and a fan-film!) before the screening.  One friendly person even gave me a homemade “Zydrate” cookie, and lots of folks had blue glowsticks that mimiced the look of the glowing blue drug in the film.  And, for the record, I think it’s hilarious that someone’s created a website at zydrate.com.  It even links to a site for a support group for addicts of the fictional drug.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that Repo! is the greatest movie ever made.  I’m not crazy about musicals, personally.  However, it’s extremely creative, and totally unlike any musical (or film) that has come before.  And it’s got more gore than you would expect, which makes the operatic part a bit more tolerable.  

I’m really glad to have seen the movie this way, and the cast and audience were very clearly hard-core fans that delighted in the campiness of the movie. 

Props to that cast, by the way.  They’re a local group that call themselves the 90 Day Delinquents, and you can check out their site for upcoming performances.

It’s clear to me that Repo! may well become the next generation’s Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Will it stand the test of decades?  Will shadowcast screenings like this one propel it to the noteriety the RHPS has in the history of bad film?  Possibly, if people are actually still going to movie theaters in 20 years.   According to reposhadowcast.com, there’s already more than 20 groups in the USA and Canada doing productions like this.

Here’s a clip of a shadowcast of Repo! done in New Jersey:

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 12th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.