Blame the financial crisis for a new boom in movies with "repo" in the title, as well as a sudden interest in recycling on the part of movie studios. Cox started filming Repo Chick last January, and recently he got a cease-and-desist letter from Universal, which released Repo Man. He wrote on his blog:

I anticipated the "cease and desist" letter from The Studio, attempting to stop production of REPO CHICK on the grounds that it was an illegal sequal to REPO MAN. That was inevitable, given the history of the company, whose parent - MCA - stood for "Muscle, Cash and Attorneys." So, when a letter came, forbidding me to make my movie and signed by no less a personage than the Executive Vice President In Charge of Litigation, I stuck it in the drawer labeled 'Restraint of Trade' and carried on...

What I wasn't prepared for was the e-mail Jon Davison sent me today: an article reporting that "Universal's embattled execs" were putting their big hairy monster picture on hold, and rushing out a film called REPO MEN.

What?

REPO MEN is definitely not a sequal to my film. I still have a contract with these guys and - if they ever want to make a film based on my original work - they have to ask me to direct it. What fun that would be! But it seems The Studio has, among its souvenirs, a Jude Law thriller called THE REPOSSESSION MAMBO, shot in Canada, almost two years ago. I'm sure this is an excellent film, which Universal accidentally forgot to distribute, and now are passing off, in their innocence, as the new REPO MAN. Only a cynical person might see any attempt to catch the upward draft of REPO CHICK, and give loft to a turkey.

We wrote about Repossession Mambo a lot a couple of years ago, and actually speculated about whether it would cause problems for the smaller, campier musical film Repo! The Genetic Opera. (Remember that one? It had Anthony Stewart Head singing about drugs.)

In any case, Universal has dusted off Mambo and renamed it Repo Men, to try and catch the "repo" wave. Meanwhile, Cox tells the Village Voice he did work on an actual sequel to Repo Man, called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday, but "Nobody wants to look at Emilio Estevez anyway." Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday was "the further adventures of Otto. Otto had been kidnapped by Martians for ten years and they'd changed his physiognomy and given him a new name. He came back in 1996 with a 1983 mindset, so it was quite difficult for him to fit into the world."

As for Repo Chick, it has nothing to do with Man. Says Cox:

It's entirely a freestanding film about a very wealthy young woman who finds meaning stealing from the middle class and the poor. You wouldn't need to see Repo Man to make sense of it. It's another comedy about the economic crisis. And how the crisis has intensified so much in this round.

And he says the movie is 95 percent greenscreen, except for one "vintage train interior."

If Cox's take on the economic crisis is half as fascinating as Drag Me To Hell, then the suffering of so many homeowners will start to have a bit of an upside. That's if Universal doesn't crush his indie project before it reaches your screens, of course.

Repo Chick image from Danny Aroyo.

On Cox's blog, the director posted the above pic (and it's the only one he's posted from the set thus far. While he won't say who the actor is... we have a feeling it may be Miguel Sandoval, whom the director described as:

Gray, mentor to the Repo Chick. Sandoval, as visitors to this site will know, is an actor whose escutcheon remains unblemished by time or television. He and Jac have been joined by Ben Guillory, Xander Berkeley, Karen Black, Zahn McClarnon, Robert Beltran....

The new repo men and women have expanded their business during the credit crunch, and now grab up boats, houses, planes, small nations and even (according to the blog) small children. "Jac" is the Repo Chick, Jaclyn Jonet, who was also in Searchers 2.0 and looks a little something like this:

I'm incredibly supportive of this venture. Not only is the original director attached, he's continuing to challenge himself with what he's calling an "eight-film microfeature, monochrome movie." Plus, some old cast members are returning, and this sentence from Cox's blog fills me with hope:

we shall film a car crash, and a giant robot.

We'll keep you updated on release dates for this masterpiece in the making. Thank you to Twitch for pointing this out!

The idea of a Repo film with a "message" makes me severely uneasy. Slashfilm quoted writer Alex Cox describing it saying it will:

unfold against the background of the credit crunch and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, where repossessions of homes, cars and other forms of property is at a new high. ‘The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations…children

I trust Cox to deliver an insane script, but I worry about it getting lightened up in the process. Cox mentioned on his blog that Repo Chick will be predominately funded out of his own pocket, so there's still hope that when they start filming January 1 start date for filming. Until we know more we'll have to hold our selves over with the other Repo Man sequel that Cox wrote as a screenplay, but was turned into a novel called Waldo's Hawaiian Holiday.

The Repo Man Code:

[Slashfilm]