Gorgeous private eye and racecar driver Stacey Hanson (Anne Randall) is hired by ageing heiress Florence Chambers (Marjorie Bennett) to stay at her luxurious mansion and investigate members of her own family. The aim is to find out who among them if any are worthy of inheriting Florence's fortune. Stacey discovers all three potential heirs have something to hide. Florence's nephew John (John Alderman) is secretly gay, his wife Tish (cult film bombshell Anitra Ford) is sleeping with scheming houseboy Frank (James Westmoreland) while grand-niece Pamela (lovely Cristina Raines who graduated to Nashville (1975) and The Duellists (1977) but also Michael Winner's infamous The Sentinel (1976)) has dubious friends. One night in the midst of a party, Frank is murdered. Stacey determines almost everyone is a suspect. In trying to catch the killer before he or she strikes again, our ravishing, resourceful girl detective takes on hired gunmen and a sinister cult.
While relatively unsung Stacey! remains a minor milestone in the history of exploitation cinema. Not least since it marked the directorial debut of B-movie mogul Andy Sidaris who co-produced the film with another exploitation film legend, Roger Corman. True to form Corman wound up earning a good deal more distributing Stacey! through New World Pictures than Sidaris did making it, a lesson he later parlayed into his own profitable direct-to-video empire. The film established the formula Sidaris mined throughout his career: a cheerful mix of softcore sex and outrageous action amidst the luxurious lifestyle on the sun-kissed California coast. Indeed Sidaris more or less remade Stacey! as the better known Malibu Express (1985) which substitutes a hunky male hero for the spunky female lead and retains the cod-Raymond Chandler gumshoe narration.
Having started out directing live sports for television (and helming the football sequence in Robert Altman's M*A*S*H (1970) for which he controversially received no screen credit), Sidaris handles the Sam Peckinpah-esque bloody slow-motion shootouts and chase sequences with considerable skill. In particular a high-octane set-piece with a racecar-bound Stacey attempting to elude two hit-men in a helicopter. Compared to later Sidaris films the action content is fairly low but Stacey! ranks among his more densely plotted, thematically interesting works. The intricate, character driven murder mystery suggests Sidaris was a fan of Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer novels that were brought to the screen with Paul Newman as Harper (1966) and The Drowning Pool (1975). In satirizing the freewheeling spirit of California at the time, Sidaris pokes fun at the hedonistic hippie milieu but also evokes the spectre of Charles Manson and his cult, a touchstone for many an early Seventies exploitation movie. Kitsch double-entendres, some clunky dialogue and a few stilted supporting performances sour the mix but the film still proves surprisingly witty.
Along with a passion for voluptuous women Sidaris shares a flair for jubilant sex scenes with staccato editing (notably the dynamic, climactic psychedelic orgy) in common with fellow exploitation mogul Russ Meyer. Unlike Meyer, Sidaris never felt the need to abuse women onscreen nor stage any sexualized violence. For films chock full of sex and gunplay they are oddly benign and inoffensive. Having said that Frank's murder is a prolonged, surprisingly nasty bit of business but solidly suspenseful. Strong women dominate the Sidaris universe and in Stacey he crafts a delightful heroine. Voluptuous Playboy Playmate Ann Randall – perhaps best remembered for her small role as a robot Medieval serving wench in Westworld (1973) – doffs her duds with crowd-pleasing frequency but more crucially proves clever, resourceful and genuinely tough. Back in 1973 taking charge of one's sexuality was seen as a mark of emancipation as opposed to today's arguably more conservative conception of it is a moral weakness. Any time some guy tries to manhandle Stacey she kicks their ass. As charming and sweet as Stacey's romantic relationship is drawn to be, it is highly enjoyable to watch Landers gun down mobsters by the score while her hunky but slow-witted boyfriend Bob Eastwood just stands there uselessly.
