I remember when I first saw the trailer for ‘Repo: The Genetic Opera’: the musical horror film directed by the dude who directed ‘Saw’s 2, 3, and 4. Super ultra-violence AND show tunes?  Sign me up.  However, the movie was long, drawn out and pretty much all around awful.  Never had my hopes for a film and the actual results been so disparate… That is, until Mr. Snyder entered the picture.  I’ve been pretty vocal on this blog about my love of Zack Snyder’s pictures.  I wrote my freaking master’s THESIS about his ‘Dawn of the Dead’ remake, ‘300’ and ‘Watchmen’ are two of the most faithful comic book film adaptations ever made and I even liked the DAMN owl movie.  When I heard that this guy was FINALLY gonna get to make something with original source material AND it included a bunch of sexy ladies, explosions, and giant mechs?  I was beyond stoked.  How could anything go wrong?  Time passed, I approved of the various trailers, more time passed and “this film [was still] not yet rated”.  Well, crap.  Everyone knows what that means, when they hold off this long, you know they’re struggling with the whole PG-13 or R debate.  Seeing as this is the guy behind  three of the more violent movies filmed in the past decade, I figured the R rating was a sure thing.  Nope.  PG-13.  Huge letdown.  Don’t get me wrong, a RATING certainly doesn’t make a film good or bad, but I personally feel that Snyder’s heart comes from a place where f-bombs are plentiful and blood flows like Old Faithful, so when it failed to achieve said rating, I questioned the validity of this film being Snyder’s true “vision”.  However, my undying faith in the auteur got my ass in the seat.  I loved the introduction.  The film begins with a shot of a stage with the curtain drawn with the Warner’s logo on it which opened to reveal a small stage where the action of the movie begins.  This leads us to believe the whole film could just be a show or a figment of someone’s imagination.  Then the story begins to unfold: two girls’ mother is deathly ill and their overbearing EVIL stepfather is just waiting for the woman to die so he can inherit her cash.  After her death, it turns out he left her nothing and decides to take it out on his step-daughters.  One of the sisters as well as the film’s protagonist, Baby Doll, fights back and accidentally shoots her sister.  The evil step father then commits her to an insane asylum.  This whole sequence unfolds with almost no dialogue with a thumping electronica cover of the Eurhythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams’.  It was amazing.  It was shot beautifully, acted wonderfully, and had the edge and style that I expect from Snyder.  However, the rest of the film is basically rinse and repeat.  To cope with staying in the asylum Baby Doll and her sexy compatriots take part in these strange drawn out dreams within dreams (sound familiar?).  Each of these sequences is more of the same, too much mediocre CGI, crappy acting, and little or no plot with an electronica cover of a pop tune.  It just got increasingly monotonous and the “real” portions of the film in between the dream sequences was just disjointed and, again, very badly acted.  I think I know what Snyder was trying to do here.  I feel he was trying to do something different and I’d really like to see what he has to say if I can bring myself to watch it one more time with the eventual director’s commentary, but until then the only sucker punch during this film was the one I got right in the gut about half way through the flick.  I wanted this to be great, and it just isn’t.  Damn.  64