Lady Terminator is an illegitimate sequel to the 1984 film, The Terminator. Or maybe it is a remake? Spiritual successor? I guess "felonious rip-off" is the best way to put it. Mockbusters were a lot more interesting in the Eighties.
Lady Terminator is the English release title. In the original Indonesian it is called Pembalasan Ratu Pantai Selatan, which means "Revenge of the South Sea Queen". It was directed by Jalil Jackson, which is an alias for H. Tjut Djalil. (Foreign directors would often make up fake Anglo-ish names.) And of course, James Cameron had nothing to do with this movie. I wonder if he even knows it exists.
If you know any of H. Tjut Djalil's work, Lady Terminator is actually far less weird. Lady Terminator opens with an evil queen biting the dicks off of dudes with her vagina. That is only 10% as weird as Djalil's Mystics in Bali, a movie where a woman's head flies off her body to drink fetuses out of pregnant women. Indonesian horror is a treasure trove of wonders.
Indonesian horror at this time was trying to break out into a wider Western audience. They were not very successful. But it does explain why Lady Terminator has a mostly White cast. A good portion of this movie is a straight action movie, playing with all the big dumbass tropes of the time. Unlimited magazines, every car explodes with a single bullet, and lots and lots of angry action screaming. They probably thought this is what Americans wanted. The final fight scene is set on an empty runway so dark you cannot see anything past the characters. There's so much void space around the figures in the foreground, Lady Terminator is practically an MCU movie.
The "Lady Terminator" in question is Tania (Barbara Anne Constable), an anthropologist out to study an Indonesian myth, the South Sea Queen. She instead has a snake crawl her up snatch and then is possessed by the Queen. She's out to kill a pop star, Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker). Erica is the great-granddaughter of a nameless White guy who originally defeated the Queen. The Queen for some reason insists her revenge must take a century. There's a lot of weird surreal rules in Indonesian horror. Anyway, Erica is rescued repeatedly by Max (Christopher J. Hart), an American guy inexplicably working for a Southeast Asian police force.
As per the cast: Max sucks. He's a like shitty even worse Reb Brown. Barbara Anne Constable is surprisingly great in Lady Terminator. It is a lot harder to pull off Arnold Schwarzenegger's menace when you're naked half the movie. She does it. Her character Tania is basically abandoned by the movie once she is possessed. No attempt is ever made to save her. It's pretty cruel.
However, this also the kind of movie that is so cheap and obscure I'm not sure if these actors even are credited under their real name. I saw the movie dubbed in English, so who knows how much of the story I missed? At least the dubbing company tossed in some Terminator references: "Come with me if you want to live!" There are also at least two cuts of Lady Terminator floating around. Luckily I saw the more coherent one. RedLetterMedia reviewed a much more chaotic one years ago. I cannot say which one is the original director's vision.
Either cut though, Lady Terminator is a glorious rip-off. There are whole sequences from The Terminator that are completely copied. This movie recreates the Tech Noir shoot-out, the car chase, and the police station massacre. It is almost shot-for-shot at times. There are a few changes. Lady Terminator fucks Indonesian Bill Paxton to death, for one. Most of the time the Indonesian version is a pale imitation to the original. Instead of a final metal skeleton, Lady Terminator becomes a kind of half-melted zombie.
All together, I have seen much worse Terminator movies. Lady Terminator sucks as an action movie, but as a weird horror movie with a nudist witch queen? Sure. There's some really twisted sex stuff going on in this movie.
Next Time: Alien 2: On Earth (1980), the first Alien sequel! The one they don't want you to know about!
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