[3.0/10] Big, loud, and dumb. If I had five seconds to encapsulate Repo! The Genetic Opera to a potential viewer, I think that would suffice. I like camp. I like musicals. I like things that are gothic and weird. But this has all of the trappings of a counter culture saturnalia with none of the grace or charm. All it has is volume and stupidity, which is not nearly enough to be worth ninety minutes of your time.

I can only imagine this as the thought process for producing this film: “Well, we really like Rocky Horror Picture Show. But you know what would make it even better? If we tried to filter it through someone doing mall karaoke to a My Chemical Romance music video.” It’s hard not to compare Repo! to its midnight movie forebear, given the films shared outre, gothic, theater kid vibes. But that’s about where the similarities end, and the comparison isn’t a flattering one to the 2008 release.

But let’s start with what’s good about Repo!, since it won’t take long, and we can get it out of the way. Anthony Stewart Head (of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) makes chicken salad out of chicken shit as the Repo Man here, bringing an intensity and sense layered emotion to his role in a way that no one else in the production is. Voice-wise, Paul Sorvino’s (Rotti) baritone is pleasant and when Sarah Brightman (Blind Mag) does legitimate opera, it’s quite good.

There’s also a solid amount of aesthetic fun to this one. To be frank, the movie looks like it was made on the same two sound stages for about thirty bucks using the contents of an old Spirit Halloween Store, but the show’s production designers and costumers make a lot out of a little. Nothing we see here -- from the dark eye shadow-drenched local denizens to cartoony-looking video boards, to suspiciously manicured alleyways -- ever crossed over into feeling “real.” But that fits the other-worldly vibe of the movie and is the one area in the film where some genuine creativity is on display.

Everything else is a shitshow. Let’s start with the music. I like the idea of doing a rock opera, but the songs here are all uniformly terrible. There’s a few bright spots here and there -- “Zydrate Anatomy” has its moments and Head elevates the material in places -- but otherwise this is a sonic wasteland. More often than not, a mildly promising melody will start, only for the singers to burst in with that pop star/broadway kid crooning and belting that just sounds ridiculous mixed together. Worse yet, lots of the vocalists sound weirdly flat or off-key, below the standard of professional production. The whole thing feels like the poor bastard child of Rent in the listening department.

That’s before you get to the lyrics, which double as dialogue since the movie’s writers make a series of painful attempts at recitative throughout. Everything here is painfully on the nose. Characters just announce their motivations and emotions with all the subtlety of a scalpel jammed in your abdomen. There’s no layers or cleverness to any of the verses or choruses, most of which don’t even rhyme properly! Everything about the film is surface-level at best, which is ironic given its subject matter.

The plot fares no better. Repo! is, nominally, a twisty tale of succession and secrets between parents and children. More accurately, it is a convoluted mess of motivations that are declared five minutes before they’re relevant, elaborate revenge plots that don’t make a lick of sense, and hidden reveals that are irrelevant, baffling, implausible, or all three at once. They’re not helped by the explanatory comic segments, which somehow dump even more painful exposition into a movie where everyone just yells what they’re thinking and planning anyway.

None of the characters is recognizable as human in the remotest sense, which might work if the tone was a little more tongue-in-cheek. Instead, despite its cartoony vibe, the film still has an air of being deathly serious about all of this. That extends to the film’s garbled attempt at social commentary, with a not-so-distant future where mega-companies can repossess vital organs at the same time they’ve somehow become a status symbol among the wealthy elite. But it’s the dullest, most basic “corporations are bad” pablum you’ve already seen a million times before and nothing new to say.

The premise of hearts and spines and intestines being retaken after being financed on onerous terms at least gives the movie an excuse for a little gore. It’s mostly pretty tame and even goofy in execution, but there’s occasionally a gut-wrenching or even funny moment to be had in all the viscera-reclaiming. (Nathan playing his victim like a ventriloquist dummy was a dark laugh, to be sure.)

All of that detracts from the film’s rough-and-tumble dark party vibe. This is all seemingly supposed to be fun and a little inviting, but instead it’s mainly just stupid, too serious, and too wrapped up in its undercooked storylines to achieve that. Everything here is overblown to the point of exhaustion, with only broad personalities and the usual clichés even remotely holding it together.

Giving Repo! the most credit possible, you can see it trying to replicate the grandiosity of traditional opera. There as well, you won’t find a very subtle medium or one with a great deal of restraint or sense in character and story. Maybe this movie really is an update of that style for the 2000s, replete with the same garish approach and baroque style, albeit infused with millennial detritus and fixations rather than those of the 1800s.

But by god, regardless of whether characters are layered or plots make sense by modern standards, the music of genuine operas is at least still beautiful. Repo!, on the other hand, feels like the auditory equivalent of having a chintzy pen from Hot Topic jammed in your ear for ninety minutes.

In one of the more gruesome and supposedly emotional moments, Blind Mag gouges out her eyes, an extreme act meant to signify her willingness to give up her ability to experience the world rather than remain complicit and enslaved by her benefactor. I initially blanched at the bloody ridiculousness of that gesture, but after an hour and a half of experiencing this eyeliner-scrawled mess, that fate didn’t sound so bad.