I saw the Directors cut of Repo! The Genetic Opera

Hey Creeps
I have to say that my head is going to explode at everything I saw tonight!
Monday was Darren Bousman’s Birthday, so after a nice Mexican dinner with his lovely wife Laura, Joe Bishara, Brian Collins from www.horrormovieaday.com and VFX supervisor (my girl) Tammy Sutton – Walker, all talked about the future of Repo. DLB asked about certain fans, told us stories about his last meeting with Terrance and we worked out some preliminary plans for what is to come for Repo Fans. (He also promised to take me to Toronto if Joe Bishara went with us!) Then we all headed back to DLB’s house to check out some Repo! stuff that I had never seen.

We started out with an incredible and amazing montage of behind the scenes footage that Laura shot and edited. The entire cast and crew singing along with “Night Surgeon” and a few other songs, Alexa hiding her skittles from DLB, Terrance in full Graverobber costume running around, and so much more. It was incredible to see the on set footage with everyone in costume and being silly. Then Laura (against Darren’s wishes) showed me a few minutes of rehearsal footage of the cast out of costume doing there parts. Ogre (wearing no mask) was just in Jeans and a T-shirt rehearsing “Bravi”.

From there DLB brought me into the office where he pulled out all the different copies of the script, the storyboarded version of the ENTIRE film, the sales booklet that they printed up to get investors interested, CD’s of early music, flyers, and even some stage show promotional materials. When I started freaking out about that, he showed me his secret collection of early concept art created by Terrance for all the different characters. By now most of you have seen how the looks of the cast started and changed over time, but this was an exhaustive mix of side characters and alternate costume designs. At this point Laura came in and said that DLB needed to stop because he was going to give me a “Spooky-gasm”. But of course Darren was a little buzzed after 3 margaritas at dinner so he and his dog Chance ran to his screening room where he had a stash of more stuff, which “no one has ever seen!”

After he climbed up to his secret stash (which had other stuff like The Poughkeepsie Tapes, some dirty movies) Darren showed me the extended and UNCUT version of the trailer that was aired on Spike TV during The Scream awards in 07. He found about 4 different early cuts of the film and proceeded to show me bits of them, then he found the HOLY GRAIL. The first cut, marked 11-10-2007! The film was unfinished, with temp tracks and unfinished VFX. We watched the first 10 minutes or so, and then he scanned around the disk to find new stuff I had never seen. This version of the film had so many scenes in different order, the movie started in Shilo’s bedroom, early comic panels were in place, and then A longer version of “Gold”, and uncut “Rotti’s Chapel Sermon” the extended Opera scene, “Rotti’s Interrogation Room Challenge” with loads of extra footage, and the thing I was dying to see, the legendary Repo fight where the Hench Girls and other Repomen fight Repoman in the Night Surgeon set!

Seriously you guys, this is some amazing stuff, like a longer …way longer version of “Come Up and Try My New Parts” and extra lines, which are (of course) sung. But if I had to say the one thing that stood out from the rest was the Sarah Brightman song where she was dressed in this barely there leather outfit singing and preparing for her final song at the opera. In this version she clearly knew what she was going to do to her eyes long before she started singing “Cromaggia”

There is so much more Repo stuff that us fans have not seen, even the alternate takes, and holding on the longer shots was making me crazy. Laura was just laughing at me the whole time because I couldn’t hide my excitement in seeing this stuff. I begged and pleaded with Darren to let me take the long version of the film and show it to the fans so they can have a “spooky-gasm” like I did tonight! Darren sent me home with a bunch of goodies, now I feel bad that I didn’t get him a gift…since it was HIS birthday.

(BTW – Tammy was filming the entire thing on DLB’s camera, so start bugging him to give me the footage so I can show you some of it!)

Your best-est friend in the whole world
SpookyDan