When I was in high school, I had two friends with really strict mothers who had just started smoking. Driving around looking for good places to smoke wasn’t my idea of a good time so I decided to better spend my time by staying home and committing the entire run of The Love Boat to memory. A week later I had this conversation with my friend Doug
Me: So what did you guys do last weekend?
Doug: It was really lame. They drove me to a cul-de-sac, took off their shirts and smoked all night.
Me: Why did they take off their shirts?
Doug: So their mothers wouldn’t smell the smoke on them.
Me: One more thing
Doug: Yeah
Me: I know why they were there. What was your excuse?
For me that’s the funniest part of the joke. I understand why Maddie (co-write Dawn Herriot) is spending night after night casing out some guy she has never met. She’s desperate for love. She’s a woman with a goal. What is her best friend Lydia (co-writer Brigetta Dau) doing spending every night in a mid sized Japanese car with her? My guess is that she is there as a sign of support to the thousands of desperately unwed women around the globe. When you put it that way, it sort of sounds nice doesn’t it.
Stalkers isn’t the romanticized elegy to the sport that “Say Anything”‘s Lloyd Dobler was, but it’s disarmingly likable and just when you think that it is just a couple of girls sitting around talking cute, it jars you out of it’s seat with an unexpected development. It’s also a great personal ad for its writer/stars if they really are single. It’s rare that you see a skit and have enough questions that you’d like to see answered to merit a full length version, which is apparently the end goal of this 15 minute film.
It’s not only girls who do this. My best friend once tailed his girl friend to the movies to make sure that she was really going there with another girl. Come to think of it, what was I doing there?
