Lady Terminator

Indonesia. It's a country. Um, movies were made there sometimes. I'll level with you, dear reader; I wasn't sure how to open this review. Truth be told, I haven't seen many Indonesian horror films. I seem to recall renting Mystics in Bali through Netflix years ago (we're talking eons...Netflix was actually a respectable company at the time). Coincidentally, the guy responsible for Bali also engendered 1989's Lady Terminator. If this sounds like a wonky, diaphanous riff on a certain James Cameron vehicle, that's because it is. "Hey, Dom! How wonky and diaphanous is it?" Oh, more than a diabetic whore in your mother's bedroom, let me tell you. What does that mean? It matters none. Paragraph break!

In a baleful prologue, we see a brawny Lothario (otherwise known as a "smooth operator") successfully woo the South Sea Queen. After being brought to a crashing orgasm, the merciless witch realizes that she has been hoodwinked. Her robust fucktoy tries to slay her. Gasp! The assassination plot is stymied, but instead of simply killing her would-be executioner, the Queen places a curse on his great granddaughter. Cut to present day. The rest of Lady Terminator mirrors The Terminator with a savory pop singer (the great granddaughter) being hunted down by a cyborg eel goddess. Okay, maybe the specifics have been transfigured, but the fact remains that this is a blatant ripoff.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. For instance, I have a perverse predilection for Alien(s) ripoffs. I've seen Xtro 2: The Second Encounter on multiple occasions, for cunt's sake. I can't explain it, but derivative trash is appealing in a deleterious way. Why else would there be so many Asylum mockbusters? People dig shit, and it's not just b-movie hounds. At any rate, Lady Terminator is an unintentional playhouse of schlock tropes. The dubbing is horrendous, the editing is oafish (I suspect that the raw footage was sutured together by a headless chicken) and the "characters" are straight out of a Funny or Die sketch. Wait until you meet Snake, blonde mullet and all.

Director H. Tjut Djalil crammed this tawdry production with low-grade action sequences. You can't get bored watching this stuff. It's physically impossible. On the irriguous side of the pelvic sling (hmm), Lady Terminator failed to meet my expectations. It's my fault for hyping this fucker up for myself. I was hoping for a heavier serving of gore, but aside from arbitrary mottlings of blood, the nastiest deaths are either vague or implied. Overall, the film isn't terribly explicit. Barbara Anne Constable does grace the camera with full-frontal nudity, and I thank her from the bottom of my seminal vesicle. I struggled with the rating. I'm man enough to admit it. A three-and-a-half on the Z'Dar scale feels alright...Lady Terminator is sleazy fun.

I've read that crew members died on the set. Can anyone corroborate these suppositions? Where was John Landis when all of this happened?