It may have a Playboy Playmate in the lead, but Andy Sidaris’ Stacey is the most un-Sidaris movie Sidaris ever made (documentary The Racing Scene excepted). No matter. It’s still a damn good time. Anne Randall portrays Stacey, “the centerfold private eye,” and she’s actually a better actress than one usually finds in Sidaris movies, exuding a real wholesome, Heather Graham quality. As the film begins, she tells us she “just finished a case involving a pet chimpanzee and a talking parrot. The chimp was a slob and the bird knew too much. The maid shot them both.” Whatever that means.
Stacey is hired by a rich, old bat in Bel Air who is confined to a wheelchair, on which hangs a bullhorn so she can yell for people to push her. The woman wants Stacey to find out exactly who’s who and what’s what among her family members so she’ll know to whom she should leave her inheritance.
It doesn’t take long for Stacey to find out the chauffeur is banging the whoreish wife and trying to blackmail her with pictures of their trysts. The real mystery comes when the chauffeur is stabbed to death, but Stacey — whether she’s wearing blouses, bikinis or bare breasts — is on the case, lugging her pilot boyfriend around as she investigates. After barely escaping death a second time in one day, he finally asks her calmly, “Stace, will you tell me what that was all about?”
The action centerpiece is a bloody shootout in the parking lot of a speedway (where nary a bystander even bats an eye), soon leading to two goons in a helicopter chasing Stacey in a borrowed race car down the coastline highway. This being a Sidaris film, there’s plenty of action in the bedroom, too, and Randall is quite the hottie. Hell, even with the huge hair and the ugliest of ’70s outfits, she’s still a hottie. I also didn’t mind her T-shirt, which reads “FONDLE WITH CARE,” too. —Rod Lott