Nearly Unwatchable

It's almost too easy to pick on any movie that features Paris Hilton, but I'm going to do it anyway. I mean, come on, what were you really expecting from something called "Repo! The Genetic Opera"?

Mark Olsen of the L.A. Times has this to say about it:

"How's this for a future: In the year 2056, which will look like a post-consumer apocalypse, one company will have a monopoly on designer plastic surgery and organ transplants, giving easy financing terms with gruesome, life-ending repossession if payment is not rendered on time. And there will be songs, lots of songs . . .

The film is bad -- not good-bad, tacky-bad or fun-bad, just plain awful and nearly unwatchable. "Repo" has feet of lead, with none of the frenetic grace or swooping lyricism that make a musical film, well, musical."

Kurt Loder from MTV sums it up:

"A movie in search of a cult. Good luck."

He also goes on to say:

"Anyone intent on reviving the rock opera, that most misbegotten of pop-music genres, should consider two things. The first would be, don't do it. The second, if one were determined to do it anyway, would be the need for songs — brief musical compositions of sufficient sturdiness to ensure that they won't be forgotten while they're still being sung. With "Repo! The Genetic Opera," director Darren Lynn Bousman has ignored the first of these precepts; and his songwriting collaborators, Terrance Zdunich and Darren Smith, haven't been especially successful in observing the second. The result is a work that stirs retrospective appreciation of the mock-bombastic Meat Loaf. Meat Loaf, you'll recall, had songs."

And finally, Peter Travers from Rolling Stone weighs in:

"The idea of the director of Saw II, III and IV going at Paris Hilton seems like just revenge for her punishable assaults on acting. In this atonal, faux-arty rock opera about a futuristic bull market in internal organs, Hilton is suitably clueless as Amber Sweet, the daughter of an aria-singing mob boss (Paul Sorvino). Amber trades in her organs like fashion accessories. But a new pancreas costs money. Don't pay, and the Repo Man will tear out your guts. It gets worse, much worse. Talented actors are involved, and I will spare them by not citing their names. "Happiness is a warm scalpel," sings Hilton. Misery is enduring this Rocky Horror Paris Show."