Release Date: November 7, 2008

(out of 4)

Combine blood, guts and rock opera on acid with lots of concentrated depravity and you have "Repo! The Genetic Opera." This is a movie enamored with its own filth and its own disgust for mankind. Characters are murderous nihilists with no shred of human conscience. Because this is a movie musical with the proposed symbiosis aesthetics of Charles Manson and Metallica, it’s more into evisceration of human flesh than just plain murder.

Of course, no viewer with ordinary human feelings will find any of this fun. I suppose the filmmaker’s objective is to shock you with its rampant carnage and grotesqueness as a way to provoke you. I guess you’re cool if you can tolerate and withstand such ugliness. The film is the brainchild of Darren Lynn Bousman, the director of “Saw II” thru “Saw IV.” As a technical craftsman he is skilled but in regards to taste, he is an idiot.

Bousman floods his scenes with garish lighting to a degree that it is so over-stylized the viewer doesn’t know whether to draw the eye to the character or to a particular object – everything on screen is so saturated, and smothered in harsh colors, than any central idea by the director is neutralized. A viewer can’t be engaged in such an incoherent and rotten story. Good movies engage us because we like to anticipate what is coming next or what we hope is coming next for the characters. “Repo” makes next to know sense in whatever its conceptual idea is that you can’t even guess what you’d like to see next. You can only hope it’s over real soon. All ideas are thrown out the window. It’s only nihilism on-screen, nothing else.

So imagine a rock opera, I mean, death metal musical with non-stop bad lyrics filmed in the fashion of the “Saw” movies. An example of the bad lyrics: “I Hate You Daddy” is a rebel teen girl’s lament reprise. In terms of the set-up, the year is 2056 and GeneCo is a biotech company that offers organ transplants to citizens with health problems with finance payments available. Unable to pay, Repo Men hunt you and carve up your organs to return to the corporation. People are cut up with no given anesthetic so we can hear them scream in agony. Actor Paul Sorvino is the GeneCo corporate big cheese. What the hell is Paul Sorvino from “GoodFellas” doing in this movie? Sorvino has a legacy of starring in “GoodFellas,” one of the greatest movies ever made, and he’s tarnished his image with this dreck?

Alexa Vega is the angry teen that hates her Repo Man daddy, and Paris Hilton is some kind of Genetic Opera Star. Whatever. I could use my film scholar memory to say that “Repo” is the worst musical made since the bizarro 1980’s film “The Apple,” but actually, “Repo” is the worst movie musical I’ve ever seen. Period. And its worst than just that. It’s a depressing experience that left my mind polluted with evil images. It’s left me to believe that Darren Lynn Bousman is the most diseased mind in Hollywood.