There is a 1964 Chevy Malibu driving around Los Angeles with something in its trunk that turns anyone who opens it into a smoking pile of ash. Every bounty hunter, federal agent, and repo man in the city wants it.

REPO MAN (1984) follows Otto Maddox, a fired supermarket clerk and disillusioned punk played by Emilio Estevez, who stumbles into repossessing cars and finds a strange sort of family among the men who do it. Harry Dean Stanton plays Bud, the veteran who recruits him and lays out a philosophy of repo work that sounds suspiciously like a code for life.

The Malibu belongs to J. Frank Parnell, a nuclear physicist played by Fox Harris, who keeps dead aliens in his trunk and drives with the calm of a man who has seen too much. The government wants the car. The repo men want the four-thousand-dollar bounty on it. Punks, lizards, and a UFO cult all circle in.

Alex Cox wrote and directed the film on a low budget, blending science fiction with the deadpan comedy of Los Angeles punk life in the early 1980s. It plays like a document of a specific time and scene, filtered through repo lots, generic products, and radioactive dread.

The plot barely holds together, and that is the joke. Nothing in this world is meant to make sense, including the ending.