Stacy (2001)
That weird smell (DAMMIT Fu!), the darkening of the light, and the fact that I’m actually posting anything at all should tell you: Halloween season (not necessarily of the witch) has come once more. And I can promise you that movies will be watched and reviewed, sometimes even with a glimmer of wit. It is on.
This is Japan. Could you tell?
And candy apples with razor blades? So on the menu.
First stop: the land of the rising sun. Oh, Japan. You and your Japanese ways will forever be laughably cheesy and yet still just a wee bit disturbing for all the wrong reasons. What am I talking about? Oh, just a little movie I first found under the can’t-miss title “Attack of the Schoolgirl Zombies. ”
Premise: 3/5
Well, you saw the title I just mentioned above, right? That should give you a reasonably good idea of what the movie is about. I mean, there are schoolgirl zombies (lots of ’em), and they do attack, but there’s some other deeply bizarre shit in here that make me take down the score some because it weirds me out in an uncomfortably icky way. There’s some weird, WEIRD subtext here, which may be me reading into things a bit too much and giving a lovably stupid movie more thought than it deserves, but eww. More on that later.
Yep. Butterfly Twinkle Powder is the official name for whatever it is that zombifies the schoolgirls. Sure there's nothing "insane" about Japan!
After a titular attack of a zombie school girl in the opening scene, we find out through scrolling text and hammily serious narration that at the beginning of the 21st century, girls aged 15 through 17 are suddenly being struck by a disease that makes them euphorically happy for about a week, then they fall into a coma, die, and come back as ravenous zombies. The government created a new police division, the RRK (which stands for the–sigh–Romero ReKill unit), whose job is to go around and, well, re-kill the zombie schoolgirls who for some reason are dubbed Stacies. Loved ones, families, and friends are also legally allowed to rekill their dead teenage daughters/girlfriends/BFFs, but there are also illegal rekillers who charge grieving families money for rekilling if those families ain’t got the stones to do it and can’t get the RRK out there soon enough. For some reason, these illegal rekillers are always in cosplay uniform and have an absolute adoration for Drew Barrymore (“We’re really into her! “). The cosplaying “Illegal Stacy ReKill Team Drew ” are trying to raise enough money to pay some teen heartthrob or another to kill them once they die and become Stacies themselves. Just focus on the last part of that sentence and you’ll see part of the weird subtext I mentioned above. It’s kind of morbid for a silly zombie action flick like this, and I can’t tell if that part’s being played for laughs or not.
The other creepy subtext? I guess it’s not so subtexty after all, but it is creepy. Our main characters are really Eiko, a girl in her first stages of NDH (Near Death Happiness, but it sure needed an acronym), and Shibukawa, a reclusive middle-aged puppeteer. Eiko just chances to meet Shibukawa the day her first bout of NDH comes on, so she decides that she can see how his soul is sad and lonely like hers or something, and decides that she wants Shibu to be the one to chop her into pieces once she reanimates. No pressure or anything. But hey, she’s probably got a week or so left, so they might as well enjoy it, right? She giggles a lot (sometimes its cute, sometimes it’s maddening) and they do stuff while she teaches him about enjoying life (as long as you have an underaged girl sleeping with you, everything’s sweet, right? Do NOT answer that). They also work on a puppet play together that we find out at the end turns out to be 5000 pages long and becomes the bible for the new age.
Yep, a crazy looking girl in a bunny suit is peddling a "Blues Campbell's Right Hand 2" arm-mounted chainsaw. Truly we are in a mysterious land.
We don’t get to that for a while, because there’s still a bunch of other people who have other stories and do various things that you’ve seen in any number of zombie movies. There’s the RRK, who are burnt out on killing and chopping up girls and have a big ol’ cry about it once Eiko helps them understand that “Those girls need to be cruelly killed by those who loved them the most. That is their fondest wish and highest fortune! ” And yeah, that’s REAL dialog from the subtitles. Yow. There’s also the Day of the Dead homage division of the RRK, with the evil military bitch in charge that joined the RRK just so “she could kill girls younger than her ” and apparently boffs all the new recruits. They have a scientist who’s working on finding out what NDH and BTP are and what motivates the Stacies to eat people. As the typically Day of the Dead-ian cadet flips out and releases the zombies, the scientist figures out at the end that the Stacies eat people “out of love ” (?!???!!?) and they even love him though he’s an old geezer. Apparently this is funny news as he dies laughing while the Stacies rip his head off and eat him. So thanks Japan!
Zombie schoolgirls and ball gags. Proof that I DIDN'T just make such a thing up.
The final part of the movie is where Eiko dies after her week-long love-fest with Shibu. When Eiko first met Shibu, she told him that the characters in her name mean “eternity of words, ” and while I suppose that’s meant to be a reference to the puppet play they write together, it equally well could serve as reference to her dying mental monologue (or ghost monologue?) that goes on for a long long time about . . . umm. Stuff. And things. I couldn’t make heads nor tails of what the hell she was rambling about. It had something to do with how she had a twin sister, and it was okay to tell people your feelings, and how there’s people playing baseball, and they’re throwing baseballs like they’re meant to kill, and something about love and god knows what else. Anyways, she dies and then stops talking finally, then reanimates so that Shibu has to cut her up like she wanted him to. And either she’s sorry about something or he is, but I have no clue about any of it anymore. But they like each other a lot! Thanks Japan!
Cast: 3/5
"Eww . . . you guys are gay . . ." Only in this case it's actually true. Seriously.
I don’t know why, but even though most of the people in this movie are dumb-ass archetypes I’ve seen plenty of times in anime, I don’t hate them. I guess the whole over-the-top nature of the movie and its willful silliness make the old cliches bearable. Eiko (Natsuki Kato) is actually kind of charming when she’s not doing the annoying giggle routine or having her endless dying soliloquy, and Shibukawa (Toshinori Omi) is pretty OK too. He doesn’t say or do that much, but he’s good at looking sad which is almost the only thing this role requires of him. Most of the other folks are cardboard, or completely terrible overactors, but again it’s nothing I’m not used to. The whole movie’s pretty devil-may-care, so I can forgive a heck of a lot. I also like the Illegal Rekill Team, because they’re actually really funny as the caricatures they’re obviously meant to be, and I love the complete absurdity of their l33t combat skills. Oh Japan!
Technical: 3/5
The special effects are not all that good in this movie, but I’m sure it didn’t have a huge budget anyways. What I like about the effects, though, is that if this were an ’80s zombie flick (and there are enough homages to the classics, even discounting the tired Romero and Bruce Campbell name dropping), the special effects would be absolutely spot on. In fact, they’d be great. I recognize some of the gore scenes, even down to the way the gore looks, and for me that’s just cool. And oh yeah, there’s a lot of gore, which is always a plus, even if sometimes the movie’s too dark or badly filmed to let you see it right.
The music I’m not as big a fan of. There’s some really corny music that sounds like soft-core porn soundtrack mixed with elevator music that takes up most of the movie, with occasional digressions into butt-rock guitar assaults during the action scenes. The butt-rock is OK if you remember this is Japan and the movie’s a love letter to 70s and 80s zombie flicks, but the soft-core elevator porn background just kills it for me. But like I said, I can forgive a lot in a movie like this, especially because of the enthusiasm and fun behind it.
Wrong Axis power! This is Japan, not Italy!
Popcorn Factor: 3/5
This movie’s goofy, fun, and gory. There’s action, there’s blood, there’s Japanese insanity proudly paraded around in almost every infectiously amusing scene. It’s not always paced as well as it could be, and some of the jokes and scenes just fall flat, but there’s still enough entertainment packaged in this one to make it worth a few laughs and earnest WTFs.
Some of the things that knock the movie down from being a 4/5 involve the weird underlying, well, weirdness. There’s the whole Eiko/Shibu thing that is a bit pedo for my liking, the strange fatalistic morbidity in the otherwise exuberant Illegal Rekill team scenes, and the abrupt, overlong, and incoherent (again, reminding me of anime) deathalog from Eiko. I also got a little weirded out by the epilogue of the movie, where an elderly Shibu talks about how a few decades after the first Stacy attacks, Stacies stopped eating people, and so people could start having relationships with them again, “and children were even born ” which “were said to be the next stage in human evolution. ” Sorry, when you use the word Stacy in this movie, I think of an undead, facially-spazzing but shambling unintelligent teenage girl zombie. So then it sounds like pedo-necrophilia leads to the next stage in human evolution, and for some reason that bothers me just a wee bit. Maybe I’m just crazy, though.