Change Your Image
nickawde
Reviews
Skip Tracer (1977)
Classic that predates Repo Man
I haven't seen the film after that sole showing on British TV (see the other comments!) and never met anyone who's seen it (except my brother Fred who watched avidly with me), but the memory has stuck with me ever since. I sense that it may not have dated well, and I sort of fear to see it now, but it remains one of my all-time favourites. It predates Repo Man (another all-time great) but sort of covers similar territory, sort of. It's less surreal and far more gritty, about the hard-nosed skip tracer (that's 'bailiff' to me and maybe 'repo man' to you - anyone know what they call them in Australia and NZ?) who finds he has a heart and promptly watches his whole life and cherished values go down the tube. This came out of the beginning of a period of startlingly good films produced in Canada that lasted up to the early 1990s. There's not that many undiscovered classics around - this is one of them, as are most of those other Canadian movies.