Beware of the South Sea Queen! (Lady Terminator (DVD))

Name: hogsflesh

Hello doyoo user, You have to be logged in to use these functions... Login or register Close window

Send message to member

Product:	Lady Terminator (DVD)
Date:	03/03/07 (240 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's a very funny bad film...

Disadvantages: ...but you might not find bad films funny

(This is a review of just the film. There is a region free DVD available from Mondo Macabro which is easy to get hold of, but it doesn’t have a BBFC certificate, so you’ll have to import it.)

Terminator’s pretty cool. Couldn’t really be improved on, could it? One of the seminal sci-fi films of the 80s, and the one that really launched Arnold Schwarzenegger as a star. It couldn’t possibly have been done differently, right?

Well hang on a minute. What if, instead of Arnie, the terminator was played by a woman? And what if, instead of an unstoppable killing machine from the future, the Terminator was the reincarnation of an evil Indonesian sea goddess? And what if, as well as shooting people, it could also kill men by *having sex* with them?

Before you all start swearing at me, there *is* such a film. Lady Terminator, a fabulous Indonesian film from 1988, contains all the elements I just mentioned, and more. So much more…

The film’s prologue introduces us the South Sea Queen, some kind of sea witch who gets her jollies from having it away with mortal men (her first victim’s ohh-I’m-having-sex-it’s-so-good acting is our first hint of just what a special film this will be). If they fail to satisfy her, she kills them (I shudder at using such a dreadful cliché, but ‘in a way that will make most of the men in the audience wince’ should clue you in). If they do satisfy her, she is defeated. Naturally a studly (white) man does indeed make the earth move for her, and she is vanquished. But she bounces back with what might just be the lamest threat in history: ‘In 100 years I’ll have my revenge on your great-granddaughter!’

Flashing forward a hundred years, Tania, an American anthropologist (we know this because she keeps on telling us that’s what she is) is researching the legend of the South Sea Queen. In spite of being warned off by everyone, she persists, and soon enough finds herself possessed. (In all the Indonesian exploitation movies I’ve seen, the person who becomes possessed by the forces of darkness is an American woman, which probably means something.) Now indestructible, she sets off in search of the great-granddaughter, acquiring an Arnie style leather outfit and a whole bunch of guns along the way. She also, for no reason at all, stops off to have sex with a fair few men, all of whom end up mangled.

Her target, Erica, is a successful pop singer (we find this out through that most intrusive of expository devices, the walking-through-an-airport-being-accosted-by-a-jou rnalist scene). Most of the film is devoted to her attempts to avoid being killed by the Lady Terminator. She falls for a really wimpy looking American cop (who is nursing a broken heart), and there’s a lot of very funny police machismo in the midst of all the shoot-outs, car chases and gratuitous nudity.

This is a damn weird film. The South Sea Queen legend spawned quite a few Indonesian exploitation movies, but this one tries to reach for an international audience by combining the old legend with the most gratuitous imaginable rip off of Terminator. It lifts whole scenes straight from its successful American cousin, perhaps the most obvious being a scene in a hotel room where the lady terminator performs impromptu surgery on her damaged eye. But because it’s all so cheap and inept, it actually entertains me a lot more than the ‘real’ Terminator ever did – that’s a film I don’t need to see again, ever; this I can happily watch over and over.

As well as a fusion of mysticism and Arnie, the film also tries to be a buddy movie (there’s a lot of great buddy scenes between the various cops, and at the end the hero calls in a bunch of his mates from America to help out. One of them, Snake, is probably the funniest character in anything, ever – imagine one of the Chuckle Brothers pumped full of steroids but with an extraordinary blond mullet firing a machine gun and shouting ‘F**kin’ A!’ and you’re in the right ballpark). It also tries for a tender romance between the young victim lady and the cop-with-a-past, throws in a Ben Kenobi type older mentor, and even has a (surprisingly catchy) pop song. And, of course, it’s an exploitation movie, so we get to see the Lady Terminator naked a *lot* (she could terminate me anytime, aheh heh).

It’s all so, so cheap (although there’s a *lot* of Sony product placement). The acting is appalling throughout – although the lady terminator herself, one Barbara Anne Constable, uses her lack of acting ability to her advantage, since she really only has to look blank-faced and scary. The voices all seem to be dubbed (although an attempt has been made to lip-synch, so it was obviously made for dubbing). This results in everyone having voices that don’t quite match their characters, and because the dubbing has to try and match the mouth movements of the characters on screen, moments that were presumably supposed to carry a certain emotional weight are hurried and ineffective. This, of course, makes the film all the more enjoyable. The action sequences are actually quite ambitious in scope, and everyone’s trying their best, bless them, but they don’t quite work on their own terms. The special effects aren’t so hot either – they’re at about the standard that Dr Who had achieved five years earlier.

The dialogue is a non-stop string of cliché (‘Stop. Stop. My high heels…’). The plot makes a lot less sense than you might think, given that most of it has been stolen from a rather better-made film. The incidental music is so bog standard it could have been used in any bad action movie/thriller. And everyone looks so 80s that you couldn’t take them seriously if you tried. This is a bad, bad film. But as bad, bad films go, it’s one of the most endearing ever made, and in the right frame of mind you won’t stop laughing for all of its 80 minutes.

Part of me – a small part, admittedly – thinks that it’s probably unfair to find a low-budget film that comes from a very different and less affluent culture than our own quite as funny as I find this. But the rest of me loves this kind of thing. The film was originally released under the brilliant title ‘Nasty Hunter’.

A few people may find this offensive, I guess, with its emphasis on sex and nudity. There’s also some rather twisted imagery involving eels living inside ladies’ vaginas (only the evil ladies, of course), which is presumably something from Indonesian myth. On the whole there is a tendency in the film to regard women as castrating bitches, while men are trustworthy and decent, but the film is so peculiar that that’s probably totally unintended.

If you love a bad film then you need to see Lady Terminator. If you don’t then on the whole I’d stay away. Amazon’s marketplace sellers all seem to have it, and it can usually be got for under a tenner.

Summary: Delirious Indonesian exploitation action film