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 Girls between 15 and 17 die and come back to life as cannibalistic zombies
called Stacies. To deal with this "families are urged to kill their daughters
before they are allowed to die by this mysterious disease". A doctor is trying
to find the cause of all this but problems ensue when a soldier lets loose a
bunch of Stacies at research facility. 2001, 80 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
This has to be one of the most inept movies of the last few years. Released around the time that several Japanese zombie movies materialized (Junk , Versus, Wild Zero), Stacy has the distinction as being the hands down worst of the lot. And that's saying something considering what a gender confused heap of rock and roll posing Wild Zero was!
And really that doesn't even begin to describe this one's problems, because Stacy is not only the worst of the bunch, but it's probably about one of the poorest made movies I've seen anywhere. Italian horror movies and Ed Wood have nothing on this one. I didn't even feel like I was watching a movie while this one was unfolding in all its cheap looking digital video glory. It was like watching some kind of thing the neighborhood kids would put together if they knew how to do gore effects, had access to some editing software and somehow conned someone into writing and performing a musical score for them.
Basically, what that means is that it's an immature effort full of failed in-jokes and based around some half-formed concept about a world where teenage girls all turn into zombies and have to be hacked into 165 pieces before they stay dead. Admittedly, the concept is laughable (and keep in mind that laughable ain't the same as funny, amusing, humorous, or interesting), but what's even worse is that they basically stopped the story development once they came up with the concept. What results is a not so much a story, but a confusing series of scenes involving people you don't know and situations you can't make heads or tails of. It's really stunning in its amateurishness.
Throughout most of the movie, I didn't have a clue what was happening or who was who or what any of it meant. The movie didn't get off to a promising start when instead of beginning to tell a story, they pretty much ran down the glossary of their little fantasy world, explaining such concepts as Stacies, the butterfly dust or whatever that sparkled near them, the idea of "repeat killing", and the state of euphoric happiness the girls go into right before turning into Stacies.
I was a little bit concerned about this start since it seemed to resemble one of those dopey fantasy novels that comes with a map and list of terms in the back, but I had been hearing good things about this on the Internet and we all know that the Internet is never wrong or full of morons posting their braindead thoughts, so I was prepared to absorb that knowledge since it would undoubtedly heighten my enjoyment of a movie that was sure to really get going once the preliminaries were out of the way.
Then, as I watched the scene unfold with one camera and looking like it was shot with somebody's digital video camera they bought at Circuit City and I saw some professor start overacting and swinging his cane at the camera which resulted in a really bad special effect designed to act like the camera had been wrecked by the cane (you know - the screen shakes, gets lines, and goes all fuzzy), I realized that maybe, just maybe, I had been duped by Synapse's slick looking DVD packaging and nice menus and that this was really just some crappy half-assed backyard production, but since it came from some backyard in Osaka instead of some backyard in Tulsa, it was part of some new wave of horror that merited a fancy DVD release instead of ending up in a shoe box under some teenager's bed with the rest of his local productions.
Things only went downhill from the opening scene however. The movie was about three-quarters over by the time I figured out that the director intended that his movie follow a variety of different characters as they navigated about in this world of cannibalistic Japanese schoolgirls.
First of all, we have the girl that is pretty close to turning into a Stacy so she is looking for someone to kill her. Apparently, friends, boyfriends, and family have the right to kill Stacies, but total strangers cannot. That has to be left up to the Romero Repeat Kill squads. Okay, I felt you roll your eyes when you read that last sentence and yes, this movie is guilty of being overly self-referential to the point of distraction. The whole Romero reference isn't even the worst of the lot however.
That honor goes to the insipid sequence where we have to sit through a commercial for the "Bruce Campbell Right Hand 2" brand chainsaw. For those of you lucky enough not to get that reference, it refers to Bruce's character in the Evil Dead series of films, one of which has him chopping off his own hand and strapping a chainsaw to his arm to battle the undead. Here, they market these chainsaws to deal with Stacies. For some reason though at the end of the movie, when one of the characters (the puppeteer) opens up the present his Stacy girlfriend gave him, it's one of those chainsaws (she wants him to saw her up), but the blade says "Blues Campbell Right Hand 2" which provoked the only laugh in this whole grisly affair.
A reference I didn't get was when a trio of gals who operated an illegal Repeat Kill squad named themselves after Drew Barrymore. You would think that I am making this up to be whacky, but I assure you that it all painfully happened in the film. Have I mentioned that this movie wasn't very good? And why would a society overrun with zombies not allow you to kill them whenever you wanted? Unless you're good friends with the zombies of course.
There was another storyline where a guy signed up for the army and was working at a facility where the guy with the cane was doing research on the Stacies to try and find out what was making them do all this. This new guy was haunted by the memory of his girlfriend turning into a Stacy, but that isn't terribly interesting since just about everyone on Earth who knew a girl would be haunted by that, but he does end up having an affair with his ugly middle-aged captain, so you can probably understand him being haunted by that at least.
I can't even remember what happened with this guy, but I do recall the Stacies eventually running roughshod over the operation right after the guy in charge figured out why the Stacies turned cannibal - because they want to be loved! I'm just pretending that there was a whole lot that was lost in the translation because the movie actually made less sense and became more confusing the longer you watched it. This guy who figured all this out gets torn apart by a gang of Stacies and laughs the entire time. Well, at least someone was having a good time.
I think there was also a character who was in the Romero Repeat Kill Squad who wanted to quit or at least he keep asking everyone he met whether they remembered a series of murders of school kids that happened about ten years ago. It was clear that he was the killer and we can only assume that he was feeling a tad ignored now that the Stacies were eating everyone in sight and his lame stint as a serial killer seemed so 20th century and totally irrelevant in a world where half the population has made lunch of the other half.
But really, the honors for "worst scene" in the movie (keep in mind that this is a separate award from "most poorly staged scene") is a toss up between the one in the middle of the movie involving the puppet show and the one that closed out the movie involving an explanation of how everything ended that out-stupided the rest of the movie all put together.
As far as this puppet show thing went, it involved a boy and a cat named Mitten and the boy really loved his cat, but it got wore out and lost a leg and his mom threw it out (Don't you hate when your mom throws out your pets?) and I don't remember how it all turned out because I was busy looking in my soda to see if someone had slipped a controlled substance in it, because I just knew that this puppet show involving a cat named Mitten was not happening in a Japanese zombie movie. (Say what you want about the Italians and their zombies, but they never muck things up by trying to get philosophical or existential on you. Sure, you might have a bearded guy bemoaning who the real monsters in our society are or something, but that's usually right before he gets his face bit off.)
Okay, that was pretty bad, but the ending is right there with it. It takes place in the future when this puppet guy is remembering what happened with all the Stacies. Eventually the Stacies stopped eating people and regular guys, being the regular horny guys they are, took the Stacies as their wives and had kids with them and these kids turned out to be the next evolutionary step in humankind's existence and this puppeteer wrote a 5000 page book about something having to do with him, and Mitten and his dead Stacy friend and it became the new bible for a new world.
If this was supposed to be a parody of something, I have no idea what it was parodying or what point it was trying to make. Everything about this movie seems completely botched and either ill-planned or downright un-planned. It's confusing and nonsensical in a way that disengages the viewer like few movies in recent memory. The movie isn't smart enough or funny enough to succeed in spite of the technical deficiencies and the mainstream viewing audience will probably be shocked by how homemade some of it looks.
Nothing in this movie works, from the in-your-face references to previous zombie movies to the overacting by some of the cast (the Illegal Drew Repeat Kill Squad, the guy with the cane) to the restrained acting by others (the puppeteer) to the non-acting of still more cast members (the guy that joined the army, his captain, most everyone else). This isn't a case of an idea not being developed enough, so much as the lack of any idea at all. I don't think that coming up with the thought "girls 15-17 turn into zombies" actually transcends from "pointless synaptic activity" to "idea" anymore than if I thought "dogs turn into singing pumpkins" does.
Synapse's DVD contains some liner notes that in theory shed some light on this movie, but after reading about how the movie involves "[w]orshipping not only impossible states of femininity while simultaneously reducing them to mincemeat" I had to sort of just skim through it. The liner notes do have a great nugget of information about how the director starting having an affair with a high school porn star and began stalking her after they broke up and then wrote a book about all of it including the "various restraining orders" that were involved. And yes, a film about it is in the works. Is it possible to get a restraining order to keep this guy at least 500 yards away from a movie camera?
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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