Stacy - 2001 - Naoyuki Tomomatsu

  A friend lent me this goretastic film about young girls who die and come back as zombie's called 'Stacy's.' The girls first succumb to this annoying disorder called NDH, Near Death Happiness, where they walk around on their tippy toes, giggle after everything that they say, talk excitedly about the death that they await, and talk endlessly and boringly about love. I think that we are supposed to find this NDH behavior adorable, as the men in the film are broken to tears watching these beautiful girls succumb to NDH knowing that they will be forced to repeat-kill them. If I watched someone experience NDH, I wouldn't wait until they died to kill them -I cannot describe how annoying it is to watch someone dance around ranting and raving about love, and how beautiful love is, and how special love is, and how love is what all of the Stacy's want while they tear people apart and eat their flesh.

On the subject of flesh eating, this is pretty gory. Of course the movie has its bloody young girls tearing people apart and the token mad scientist who dissects twitching pieces of Stacy flesh -all of which has a Troma-esq feel to it. A government agency called "Romero Repeat-Kill Troops" take care of the Stacy's by cutting them up into pieces and destroying them. Buckets full of twitching body parts prep you for the scene with the scientist (see left), whose experiments involve moving innards. Not that any of this is all that realistic, or original, or too hard to look at gross. It is just gory.

There is also this team of Drew Barrymore fan girls that have taken it upon themselves to repeat-kill the Stacy's because
they realize that the Stacy's only want to be repeat-killed by the person that they love most, and want the same for themselves when they die. I have a surprise, I also hated the Drew fan girls! They were just as annoying as the Stacy's. In fact, this whole movie was full of female caricatures that I think were supposed to be hot, or cute, or cool, and were simply annoying. I know that this is a zombie movie, and that I shouldn't expect much more from it, but it was pretty rough. I got through it and would probably have given it a better review if it wasn't for Eiko -the girl that the film centers on. We watch Eiko fall in love and go through NDH, die, come back as a Stacy and get killed by her lover. And then we find that her lover goes on to write the book of love and makes a statue for Eiko where she died. He tells us about the Stacy revolution where people learn how to love Stacy's and they actually stop eating flesh. I could not get past Eiko's terrible rant about love. Her lecture at the end of the film actually felt like a lecture, it was painful and unconvincing. My friends were all squirming and yelling about how they couldn't believe the movie wasn't over while she was rattling on about fluffy love love shit shit. It was killing me. I almost Stacy'd myself to escape it. So, even though I could appreciate the gore and the Troma quality to the movie, I absolutely was bored to hell with it. Oh, and annoyed.