Review: LADY TERMINATOR (1989)

LADY TERMINATOR may very well be the quintessential "so bad, it's good" movie. Marketed as Indonesia's answer to James Cameron's 1984 classic, the film is an hour and twenty minutes of glorious garbage haphazardly strewn over THE TERMINATOR's narrative framework. You've still got your time-travelling, super assassin, sure, but you've also got a crotch-dwelling eel that bites off unsuspecting men's penises. I don't really remember that being in THE TERMINATOR, but then again, it has been a few years since I sat down and watched the whole thing.

The film begins with a sex scene, fulfilling the first half of its tagline's promise, "SHE MATES..." Things seem to be going pretty well, and this despite the fact that they're both wearing clothes, à la Steven Seagal's work between the sheets (no bulky hoodies, though). Then out of nowhere, the woman, who's straddling the guy, makes a face like she's trying to bend a spoon with her mind and blood starts shooting all over the guy's chest. He dies and the woman summons attendants to haul his corpse away. Truly, "SHE MATES, THEN SHE TERMINATES." THEN SHE EATS GRAPES and asks herself if there's any man who can satisfy her. The next guy comes close, but really kills the mood when he pulls an eel out from between her legs, transforms it into a dagger, and shouts, "You are my wife now!"—I love learning about other countries' marital customs. The woman isn't looking to settle down though, and swears vengeance on the guy's great-granddaughter before vanishing.

Look, if I haven't already sold you on LADY TERMINATOR, then there must be a hole in your life that no amount of eels will fill. But, if like me, you're already writing the Academy to tell them they dropped the ball with their 1989 Best Foreign Language Film selection (sorry, CINEMA PARADISO), then take my hand, my friend, and come along with me...

Fast forward one hundred years. Tania, played by Barbara Anne Constable, is a budding young anthropology student writing her grad thesis on The Legend of the South Sea Queen, a story referenced in the opening credits as a basis for the film (no mention of THE TERMINATOR, though). It seems the woman from before—you know, the one with the crotch eel—, was said legendary Queen, and with the help of a strange library book and a local sea captain who looks a lot like an Indonesian Quint from JAWS, Tania sets sail to locate the submerged ruins of the Queen's former palace.

The Captain tries to warn Tania that his first mate, Popeye (seriously), lost his brother to the sea when he embarked on a similar expedition, but dammit, "people are building space stations on the moon," and Tania won't be deterred from diving down to the palace. She should have listened, because before long, she's tied to a bed with an eel all up in her. If I've lost you, I apologize, but that's really what happens next. Meanwhile, the Captain falls victim to a wave, which I assume is supposed to be one of those huge, PERFECT STORM, Clooney-killing type waves, but which comes across as a normal-sized wave that the camera operator zooms in on (because it is). I didn't realize what was happening until a stagehand or someone dumps a bucket of water on the Captain and we never see him again.

You're probably wondering, "Hey, Dylan, isn't this supposed to be a TERMINATOR knockoff or something?" Up until this point in the film, there hadn't been anything even remotely TERMINATOR-esque about LADY TERMINATOR, but a sudden, heavy synth score, very reminiscent of Brad Fiedel's work in T1 and T2, heralds change. If you'll recall, early in THE TERMINATOR, Arnold's T-800 has a run-in with some punks, including a blue-haired Bill Paxton. They seem like jerks, to be sure, but they really only poke fun at the T-800 for being ass-naked at a public observatory ("Wash day tomorrow... Nothing clean, right?"). Seems like fair game to me. It isn't until the T-800 demands that the punks fork over their clothes that they get hostile. In LADY TERMINATOR, we get a similar scene, except these two guys are fucking lunatics. I shit you not, one of them is drinking their own urine and talking about marrying his right fist—the epitome of self-sufficiency, I suppose, but crazy nonetheless. He also invokes our favorite pickpenis, "Hey, remember the legend of the South Sea Queen? Wouldn't it be nice if she could come now?" Apparently he skipped the chapter with all the dick thievery. Well, be careful what you wish for, bud, because just then, a naked Tania, possessed by the Queen via her crotch eel emissary and thus given supernatural powers, emerges from the water to seduce, and ultimately kill the men in a manner in keeping with the Queen's unique M.O. Granted, in THE TERMINATOR, the T-800 doesn't rely on penetration to kill the punks (excluding his fist penetrating that one dude's chest), but the synth score and Constable's steely gaze help LADY TERMINATOR to effectively mimic the general feel of Cameron's film. The scene ends the same way, too, with Tania stealing one of the punks' cool jackets.

I like this scene because it's the first to really illustrate what LADY TERMINATOR is in relation to THE TERMINATOR, i.e. a remake that substitutes an Indonesian legend for Cameron's dystopian drama, and schlock for his style. In THE TERMINATOR, the T-800 uses a phone book to find all the Sarah Connors in L.A. (this was before all that CATFISH, Spokeo shit, kids). He eventually gets the address right but ends up shooting Sarah Connor's roommate, having mistaken her for the mother of the resistance. Tania makes a similar mistake in pursuit of that guy's great-granddaughter, who we learn is named Erica, and shoots her friend instead. I don't know how Tania got so close to finding Erica—maybe the crotch eel acts as a sort of dowsing rod or compass needle—, but the point is, both films hit the same general story beats. The difference, though, is in the execution. Not how the women are killed, because they're both shot, but how the filmmakers handle these scenes. Cameron prefers to focus on the T-800 over the havoc he wreaks, because Arnold has incomparable screen presence. When the T-800 kills Sarah Connor's roommate, we get a quick shot of a bullet tearing through her nightgown and sending her flying, but the meat of the scene looks like this:

In LADY TERMINATOR, conversely, director H. Tjut Djalil (credited as Jalil Jackson), opts for the "schlock and awe, motherfuckers!" approach, so when Tania kills Erica's friend, it looks like this:

Later in THE TERMINATOR, the T-800 tracks Sarah Connor to a police station where she's being held and proceeds to trash the joint. He rams a car up some poor pencil-pusher's ass, cuts the power to the building, and kills a bunch of dudes—about 14, by my count. It's great, operatic violence that plays like a John Woo scene minus the doves and blood squibs (save for during a couple of key kills). In LADY TERMINATOR, Tania does nearly the same thing, right down to driving a car through the station, only everything's ramped up. Some guy is at the front desk complaining about his paycheck being short when Tania comes crashing through the front doors, and there's a third guy kicking around in the back that gets it, too. I counted at least 31 definite kills, more than twice the amount in THE TERMINATOR's equivalent scene. Shockingly, LADY TERMINATOR not only excels in terms of its kill quantity, but also in terms of its kill quality. Now I'm not saying that this crazy eel-stuffing, piss-drinking Indonesian ripoff is better than Cameron's original film, but I defy you to watch it and tell me that it isn't more fun. So while it's reasonable that the T-800, a machine programmed to kill, would go for vital organ shots (head, chest, etc.), these just aren't as laughably over the top as the stuff you find in LADY TERMINATOR. I mean, Tania's running around shooting people's dicks off.

One guy even gets the full Sonny Corleone treatment, but Tania puts her own special spin on it and kicks him in the crotch instead of the face.

You get the sense that this stupid movie is always actively trying to one up THE TERMINATOR, a film that cracked IMDb's top 250 (it currently holds the #206 spot) and that was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, and you've just got to admire that degree of temerity. I mean, it even throws down the gauntlet to Linda Hamilton's mullet.

That mullet dude is Snake, by the way, and his scenes are undoubtedly my favorite parts of the film. We're first introduced to him during a bar fight between LADY TERMINATOR's Kyle Reese character, Max, and some guy with a ponytail who tries to proposition a girl by calling her "pretty face" twice and asking if "she wants to feel it first." Max punches the guy, who then stumbles over to Snake's corner of the bar, where he's greeted with a "HI, ASSHOLE," and treated to another shot in the breadbasket and several of Snake's overemphasized, mullet-whipping head turns. We learn that Snake is Max's old army buddy, which explains their great fight chemistry, but then he disappears until the end of the film, when he suddenly reappears to clasp hands with Max and their other buddies and shout, "Let's kick ass!" And kick ass they do. Snake definitely kicks the most, sprinting away for literally seconds and somehow returning with a tank. He rips around, shouting things like "CHARGE" and "FUCKIN' A" while standing up through the open hatch and flexing. He also gets the honor of diving through the air while a tanker truck explodes behind him. He's everything I wish I could be.

Man, I should really wrap this up before I fall any deeper down the eel hole. There's just too much crazy shit in this movie to try to contextualize. It has everything—Achilles crotches, laser eyes, hilariously inappropriate reactions to a friend's death, and the creepiest fucking fire mask I've ever seen on a stunt performer. Seriously, they look like Leatherface...

If you're wondering about the performances and the script and all that, well, you've probably come to the wrong critic, but you're definitely approaching this film the wrong way, because everything about LADY TERMINATOR is terrible. But it's that special kind of terrible, the kind that seems to transcend criticism. The film is one misstep after another, ultimately taking you somewhere the filmmakers likely hadn't intended, but the journey is enormously entertaining, and I'm of the belief that the only truly bad films are the boring ones.