“Ra-di-a-tion. Yes, indeed. You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked goggle-box do-gooders telling everybody it’s bad for you. Pernicious nonsense. Everybody could stand a hundred chest X-rays a year.”

There are few movies as utterly and sublimely weird as Alex Cox’s debut feature, Repo Man. This is a film with a plot that revolves around the whereabouts of a particular 1964 Chevy Malibu, driven across the Mojave Desert by a lobotomized research scientist, that may or may not contain dying extraterrestrials or a neutron bomb in its trunk; in which the same is pursued by a team of government agents led by a woman with a metal hand, as well as two separate car repossession companies vying for the outsize bounty; in which a streetwise repo man fires blank rounds on the job and proselytizes for a knock-off version of Scientology; in which another does speed with his understudy while developing an adhoc code of professional ethics; in which televisions, radios, and PA systems emit satirical blurbs that would feel at home next to the best of Grand Theft Auto’s parodies; in which a punk rock liquor store robber disguises himself with an open-top paper bag to protect his fussed-over mohawk; in which the protagonist gets pepper sprayed for throwing a dead rat on a woman’s lap, and slapped twice for requesting sexual favors from a girl in a UFO cult; in which a trash-burning stoner philosopher lectures the rookie repo man on the “lattice of coincidence” and time machines, accuses John Wayne of being a homosexual, and flies off into the night sky in the glowing-green Malibu that turns everyone but the enlightened into bumbling idiots.

Repo Man is not so much ahead of its time as outside of it, just as its suburban punk-cum-repo agent Otto (Emilio Estevez) is only marginally tied to the SoCal hardcore scene that informs the film’s visual and aural aesthetic. Circumstantially trapped between the lackadaisical life dropouts of his own generation and the empty-headed reformed-hippie televangelicals who have replaced his pothead parents, he seems disconnected from it all, a vessel of aimless, affectless rage. To wit, we find him in an early scene hunkered down by an overpass chugging beers all by his lonesome, shouting out the lyrics to Black Flag’s ‘TV Party’—essentially a list of primetime television shows. “Saturday Night Live! Monday Night Football!” he yells. Another finds Otto alone in a crowded club while the (now-legendary) hardcore punk rockers The Circle Jerks play as an acoustic lounge act. “I can’t believe I used to like these guys,” Otto says.

But his other option is equally unpleasant. When he visits his parents to ask about a sum of money promised to him if he straightened up and finished his schooling, they peel their eyes away from their beloved scam artist’s telethon only long enough to tell their beloved son that his graduation present was used to “send Bibles to El Salvador” (or maybe to make a down payment on the snake oil salesman’s next private jet). “You’re on the honor roll of the Chariots of Fire,” his father tells him. Brilliantly, Cox elected to forego all product placement opportunities. And rather than allow some incidental instances to creep into his picture, he went so far as to replace all the labelling on products with generic titles; thus Otto does not drink Budweiser or Miller Lite but “BEER” or “LITE BEER.” At the grocery store, he stocks “YELLOW CLING SLICED PEACHES” and “CORN FLAKES.” In his parents’ kitchen he dips his spoon into a tin can of “FOOD.” (Hilariously, many of these generic foodstuffs were actual products from Ralphs supermarket.) Even legitimate generic items like the tree-shaped, evergreen air fresheners that hang on rearview mirrors become a running joke. In a cheeky twist, the repo men are all named after name brand beers. These anti-product placements effectively make the viewer hyper-aware of their presence in other forms of entertainment and our general environments.

In any case, Otto finds himself culturally homeless: a misfit with the consumerist culture that’s left him without purpose in life and duped his parents into paying for a bastardized, consumerist version of salvation; but similarly lacking in harmony with the rampant idiocy that marks the local punk scene (slightly satirized in the film with a fun mix of affection and mockery). Rejecting both of these disagreeable lifestyles but lacking direction, he acts out and gets himself fired from his job at the grocery store. As providence would have it—right place, right time, it seems—he’s tricked into stealing a car for a world-weary old vet named Bud (Harry Dean Stanton) and is thus introduced to the seemingly lawless profession of car repossession as well as a delightfully colorful cast of characters: fellow repo men Lite (Sy Richardson) and the Rodriguez brothers (Del Zamora and Eddie Velez), fiery office manager Marlene (Vonette McGee), perpetually on-break rent-a-cop Plettschner (Richard Foronjy), and picked-brain philosopher Miller (Tracey Walter). Subtler than the critiques of consumerism and religion (which are intimately bound in this film) is the idea that indoctrination is basically unavoidable. Consider that even Bud, who initially appears as a free-thinking outsider beyond the reach of it, has simply replaced the prominent forms of propaganda with his own version of religious dogma.

Never broke into a car, never hotwired a car. Never broke into a truck. ‘I shall not cause harm to any vehicle nor the personal contents thereof, nor through inaction let the personal contents thereof come to harm’ It’s what I call the Repo Code, kid! Don’t forget it. Etch it in your brain. Not many people got a code to live by anymore.

But anyway so what was all that about UFOs and aliens and the collective unconscious and metal hands? Well, inbreaking on Otto’s story of existential angst is a whacky tale involving a rogue research scientist (Fox Harris) who has smuggled something out of Los Alamos National Laboratory in the trunk of his Malibu. He’s trying to take it to his fellow UFO enthusiasts at the United Fruitcake Outlet, but as he explains to Otto when the two briefly meet, some government-sponsored surgeons have been mucking about with his prefrontal cortex, leaving him to swerve around the road with his contraband in tow like a child’s bowling ball bouncing off the gutter guards. He also seems to suffer from radiation poisoning. Otto accidentally stumbles onto this radioactive MacGuffin by picking up Leila (Olivia Barash) on a whim, only later realizing that her zany plea for help tracking down the Malibu is legitimate when he sees the $20k bounty come through on the fax machine and a picture of the “aliens” (which look like water-ballooned condoms with fishing lures glued onto them) in the newspaper. This unconventional tangent inclusion of the sci-fi storyline comes out of left field and works on its sheer novelty alone.

Further, though, Repo Man is one of those beautifully messy sci-fi films with a world that exists beyond the boundaries of the film itself. Consider Otto’s former friends, a trio of mohawked punks who rob every convenience store that Otto and Bud visit for beer; or Leila, who initially appears to be a truth telling UFO fanatic, an unfortunate victim of government suppression, but then seems to take great pleasure in administering torture; or the televangelist in league with the CIA; or the cyborg Agent Rogerz (Susan Barnes) who is flanked by blonde men in black suits and sunglasses; or the ambitious, dorky fry cook Kevin (Zander Schloss); or the men in hazmat suits casually removing bodies from a white van; or the weather man who describes “freak showers of tiny cubes of ice”; or the news reports of bombed refugee camps. There’s a scatterbrained apocalypse looming on the periphery of the plot, and Otto’s detached amusement is the very reason he’s able to survive the impending cataclysm, joining Miller in a cathartically hypnagogic joyride in the sky aboard the glowing green Malibu.

Repo Man is one-of-a-kind; a singular blend of disparate elements that come together in a sprawling combo of anarchic sensibilities, quotable dialogue, and goofy sci-fi trappings; a reality-adjacent bonanza of pleasantly messy apocalyptic world-building; a proudly odd, satirical masterpiece; a reminder that “the more you drive, the less intelligent you are”; a breath of fresh air. They just don’t make ‘em like they used to.