Starring Barbara Anne Constable, Claudia Angelique Rademaker, Christopher J Hart
Rated R
Indonesia
"Me and Jack have seen more dead bodies than you've eaten hot dogs, so shut up and eat!"
Sheena Easton lookalike Barbara Ann Constable plays an American anthropologist abroad in Indonesia, searching for some evidence of the legend of the South Sea Queen. What better place to look, than the South Seas? She charters a boat helmed by some salty old fucker, and after prancing around in a bitchin' black bikini, she dives into the water exactly where the South Sea Queen still resides, deep in her underwater sex grotto. The witch snatches the bewildered scientist, ties her down with green scarves and...well, logic gets fuzzy here, but Babs - now a Terminatin', penis-eating killer, under the Queen's demonic spell - gets spit up onshore a few hundred miles away. She happens upon a cuppla losers with nothin' to do but drink beer and piss, and she fucks 'em both until they die a screaming, bloody death. Then she splits.
Meanwhile, Erica is a cute Indo-pop singer, who happens to be the great grand daughter of the guy whose penis was so hard-as-steel that it quelled the SS Queen's killing spree many years ago. The queen vowed she would get revenge on Iron Penis's offspring, and Erica is it. Cue the crazy ass white girl with the gun, the Lady Terminator herself, who is quite willing to waste 500 Indonesian cops and half a shopping mall to get to Erica. Toss in a dull-as-toast American cop as a half-hearted love interest/hero, his gung-ho buddies as comic relief, a few model helicopters and tanks to blow up, and more bullets than all three Rambos, and you've got one head-scratching mess of Indonesian weirdness on your hands.
Not that I'm complaining. I mean, watching a chick dressed up like Olivia Newton John at the end of Grease shoot cops for an hour is fun no matter where it comes from, but here's the thing. Obviously, they wanted to cash in on the Terminator name here, but the chick is possessed by a magic queen. She's not a android. Yet, she's wearing a fetish-y black leather ensemble and sporting a machine gun, just like cyborg Arnie did, and she gets shot about 7,000 times, but the bullets have no effect. Furthermore, later on in the film, she digs out her eyeball with a knife and cleans it in the sink. Then she pops it back in. Why? It's not a robot eyeball, for Chrissakes. Even if you've suspended all the disbelief you possibly can, you are still left going, "What the FUCK?!" half a dozen times here, even if it's just to keep your sanity.
Ah, but regardless of its gaping logic holes, Lady Terminator is such a bizarre mixture of legend and rip-off that it's impossible not to watch. As it rolls on, you become less concerned with the story, and more with the actual film- did the American actors say their lines in English, while the rest of the cast spouted off in their native tongue? Did anyone mention to the director that after the first thousand bullets, it no longer makes any sense to keep shooting at her? Was there even a script written before they started filming, or did they just patch it all together as they went along? And perhaps most importantly, why didn't Barbara Ann make another film after this one? Sure, it's a freakshow, but a career killer?
Good questions all, and hell, we don't even need the answers. Films like this are just snapshots of a time and place far from here, and you really can't get much farther away from here and now then the amazing Lady Terminator.
