UK Release Date: 09-03-2009
Price: £15.99
UK Certificate: 18
Director: Darren Lynn Bousman
Country: US
Distributor: Lions Gate Home Entertainment

A surprising starry cast camps it up in this gothic gorefest, clearly out to steal The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s cult following. It’s set in the near future, in a world laid waste by an epidemic of organ failures. GeneCo, a biotech corporation, offers organ transplants and the loans with which to pay for them; defaulting on the loans results in repossession of said organs. Cent­ral characters are the conflicted repo man (Anthony Stewart Head) who believes he accidentally killed his wife and tries to protect his daughter (Alexa Vega), who has a rare disease, by keeping her locked up in his Hammer Horror-style mansion. The film follows this innocent as she escapes, searching both for a cure and for the truth about her family’s mysterious history.

Much of the fun comes from the casting: head of GeneCo is Paul Sorvino; Sarah Brightman claws her own eyes out as aging singer Blind Mag; Paris Hilton plays  a rich daughter and plastic surgery addict whose face falls off. As you’d expect from the director of the Saw sequels, there’s plenty of blood, particularly in the organ retrieval scenes, and the drug which has much of the populace hooked – it numbs the pain of surgery – is extracted from the eye sockets of corpses. Sets and costumes are suitably OTT, plotting is pleasingly ludicrous and the cast throw themselves into their roles with abandon. Even the film’s messiness and satirical bluntness could almost be passed off as endearing, were it not for the fact that it never generates enough momentum to gather you up in its silliness. This is chiefly the fault of the songs, which are about as catchy as a funeral dirge, with ‘rhymes’ that would have William McGonagall turning in his grave. Still, its heart – at least metaphor­ically – is in the right place.