Beer Beer

What do Emilio Estevez and Shane MacGowen have in common? Not a whole lot, except that both are awesome and both had a brief affiliation with indie movie director extraordinaire Alex Cox in the 1980's. You may remember a little movie he directed called Repo Man which featured Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton hunting alien sausages, spilling beer, doing lines of speed, and getting chased by vatos locos in an LA canal ditch. It is the best movie of 1984 and quite possibly of all time. The sound track for Repo Man is legendary and has on it some of the best punk rock ever recorded. Suicidal Tendancies' "Institutionalized" alone makes this album a keeper, but you also get some Fear, Black Flag and the Circle Jerks (bass player Zander Schloss even makes a cameo in the film as main character Otto's bespectacled best buddy) . Iggy Pop recorded the title track and it is one of his better solo songs in my opinion. A sequel for Repo Man called Waldo's Hawaiin Holiday was written by Cox but never turned into a movie, however a graphic novel adaptation of the script was created and released by Gesalt Publishing in 1997 and looks pretty awesome. You can check it out here . A year after Repo Man, Alex Cox was commissioned to shoot a video for Celtic folk punkers The Pogues and their song Pair of Brown Eyes, easily the best song off of their album Rum Sodomy and the Lash. The video is a dystopian vision of gouged out eye balls and dancing New World Order police men and is a total hoot. I love that Cox was able to work scenes of the Pogues performing amongst all of the Orwellian creepiness. Alas, Shane MacGowen was not the only punk rock legend Cox would collaborate with. He and the late, great Joe Strummer would also hook up to work on a couple of films: Straight to Hell and Walker , neither of which achieved the cult hit mega status of Repo Man, which in turn never achieved the critical acclaim of Cox's other masterpiece, the heart warming date movie Sid and Nancy.