What really startles are some of the unexpected performers lunging around in the murk. Thirty years after 'The Rocky Horror Picture Show,' there's nothing shocking about the third-hand decadence on display here. Instead, he wants to bequeath his empire to Wallace's daughter, Shiloh ( Alexa Vega, of the 'Spy Kids' films), because her late mother was, as he sings in a characteristically tuneless interlude, 'once very dear to me.' The plot thickens like a week-old blood pudding. Largo is terminally ill, and determined not to let his lucrative organ business pass into the hands of his good-for-nothing children (one of them played by Skinny Puppy frontman Ogre another, with unwarranted enthusiasm, by Paris Hilton). One of them is secretly a doctor named Nathan Wallace ( Anthony Head, of the 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' TV series), who's been forced into this vile sideline by Geneco founder Rotti Largo ( Paul Sorvino). The scalpel-wielding characters who carry out these grisly interventions are called repo men. It's set in a post-apocalyptic world in which millions have died in an epidemic of organ failures, and a biotech company called Geneco has arisen to sell transplantable organs to needy survivors - and to repossess the pricey innards whenever the owners fall behind in their payments.

The movie has metastasized from a 2002 stage play written by Zdunich and Smith and directed by Bousman.

Repo the genetic rock opera