Among the more impressionable artifacts of my teenage years is a certain compact disc I came across while dumpster-diving through my parent’s discarded knick knacks:

It was blank and unsuspecting, with the letters “RM” scrawled in sharpie across its surface. In what would turn out to be a serendipitous stroke of curiosity, I popped it in my Playstation - which quickly rejected it - and then into the family CD player. I was greeted by what is to this day one of the most undeniably badass musical compositions I’ve ever heard: Iggy Pop’s “Repo Man,” the theme to the Alex Cox film of the same name.

Turns out the CD had Repo Man’s entire soundtrack on it, including songs from Suicidial Tendencies, Black Flag, Circle Jerks, and others, all of which promptly blew my 14-year old mind. And now at the ripe old age of 21, I’ve only just gotten around to watching the film, which proved to be just as fun of a discovery as the CD was that fateful day 7 years ago.

Taking place deep in the seedy underbelly of mid-80’s L.A., Repo Man is a hyperbolic satire of life under Reagan. The city’s homeless flood its decaying streets, and are subject to random incineration by government employees sporting hazmat suits emblazoned with smiley-face pins. Meanwhile, gang violence reigns supreme, mostly because the cops are busy knitting crochet and scoring six-packs.

Emilio Estevez - who you might recognize as the goody two-shoes student athlete from The Breakfast Club - stars as Otto, a young and rebellious valley punk straight out of a scene from The Decline (no, not that one, although Kelly and Tim Reyes’s Supertubes section in said film is coincidentally soundtracked by the Repo Man theme). After getting fired from his job for giving his boss the bird, Otto finds work repossessing street cars on commission through a private agency. Harry Dean Stanton of The Godfather II and Paris, Texas fame plays Otto’s mentor Bud, a seasoned veteran in the field of late night, drug-fueled repossessions who lives for the thrill of it all.

Plenty of amusing hijinks and hijacks ensue, but eventually Otto sets his sights on the mother of all repossessions: $20,000 for a mysterious glowing Chevy Malibu piloted by a lobotomized FBI agent, whose cargo is rumored to be of interstellar origin.

But Otto isn’t the only one after the Malibu; the government, the local church, and a slew of rival repo agencies all have their own motives in exploiting the extraterrestrial contents of its back trunk.

* * *

Repo Man is this week’s Friday Night Flick, a time capsule of socal punk nostalgia disguised as a cheeky sci-fi flick, one that rightly deserves its place in the 80’s canon of cult. — Jackson Todd