Lady Terminator (1989)

A notoriously Indonesian carbon copy of the 1984 James Cameron sci-fi masterpiece clumsily gels together scenes from the latter film with a mythical tale of the "Queen of the South Sea" in a bloody stew of excessive violence, gorgeous women and bad dubbing.Without giving away important plot points, as if there was any workable plot whatsoever. The Queen possesses a nerdy, bimbo anthropological student (Barbara Anne Constable), which somehow turns her into a leather-clad, drop-dead killing machine that would make Rose McGowan's Cherry Darling look like a plain-Jane desk secretary.The supporting players in the film consist of a yuppie cop (Christopher J. Hart) who has to protect a pop singer (Claudia Angelique Rademaker) for unknown reasons except for a necklace that the title character is after.Constable (looking a lot like Valeria Golino) fits into her dominatrix role rather nicely with some trace of human emotion more than Kristana Loken's laughable T-X. But I've got to give the filmmakers credit for attempting to redo a well-known Schwarzenegger film in a third-world country with all of the determination and limited resources available at the time.Overall, if you are a trash purist, go with this film. If you are a die-hard Terminator fan, skip this one. Two stars for the film, and two stars for the actress playing the title role: the one and only Barbara Anne Constable.

Wow! Phew! This has never happened to me before … I've never been in love as much as I'm in love with Lady Terminator. Ours is a marriage made in heaven and I swear I'll love her till the end of times. She's quite the lady, all right, but she's also so much more. She's the duchess of sleaze, the queen of exploitation, the empress of tastelessness and the goddess of rip-offs! This is quite possibly the most outrageously amusing movie ever made and all those people complaining about how awful and unoriginal it is should either lay off drinking entire bottles of vinegar and/or make the effort to research what the (foreign) exploitation film industry is all about, anyway. How do you recognize the ideal cult movie classic? Well, if you're witnessing gratuitous nudity, bloody killings, eels crawling out a woman's vagina and inexplicably changing into a daggers and delightfully cheesy quotes like "I shall now retire to the see but return in a hundred years to have my vengeance on your great-great-granddaughter…"), during the first five minutes – even before the opening credits appeared on screen – THEN I'd say you found yourself the ideal cult movie classic. And it even gets better… Much better, in fact! One hundred years ago, the malignant Queen of the South Sea swore to kill the female descendant of the man she loved but whom betrayed her. To fulfill this promise, the Queen's evil spirit possesses the luscious body of an innocent young anthropologist student (Barbara Anne Constable in her sole but unforgettable performance) and turns her into an indestructible, unstoppable, sex-driven and relentless killing machine. Armed with heavy artillery and a literally endless amount of ammunition, Lady Terminator goes on her mission and she isn't too concerned about the trail of collateral damage she leaves. Our heroine quickly finds her target but she – Erica – receives protection from a clique of hilariously implausible cop characters, one with a ludicrous mullet. I honestly can't imagine anyone who watches "Lady Terminator", with the correct attitude and/or in the right state of mind, won't tremendously enjoy it! Everything about this movie is so WRONG; I simply love it! The sudden change in tone, from an Indonesian folklore myth about the Queen of the South Sea into a wannabe American Sci-Fi imitation of one of the genre's greatest classics, is stupendously amusing, the character drawings are wondrously inept, the dialogs as well as the acting performances and the English dubbing are completely bonkers to listen to and – last but not least – the use of violence is so unimaginably excessive and graphical! If you love James Cameron's "The Terminator" (and who doesn't, right?), you actually should watch "Lady Terminator" and try and consider it as some sort of crazy homage. As soon as the possessed girl walks out of the sea butt-naked, the shamelessly copied ideas and sequences of "The Terminator" become impossible to list. Almost identical to how Arnold Schwarszenegger did it, Lady Terminator dodges shotgun bullets, drives a car into a police station in broad daylight, performs eyeball operations on herself and makes a whole lot of victims before she reaches Sarah Connor… I mean, Erica. This movie literally has everything: gore, sex, stupidity, bizarre characters, a typically 80's pop-song sung from start to finish, an incredibly inappropriate "we're falling in love" sub plot and a stoned 80's dude with the ugliest mullet hairdo ever. Please marry me, Lady Terminator?

Well, maybe the Addams Family. Completely, utterly whacked-out combination of cheese, sleaze, gore, sex, blood, explosions, shootouts, hot Asian chicks, mullet-headed stoners driving armored cars, inane dialog, brainless disco songs, guns that never run out of ammunition--all the things that make life worthwhile. Not as polished as your average Hong Kong martial arts / vampire / sorcerer flick, but with just as much if not more energy and sense of fun, intentional or otherwise. An Indonesian evil spirit called the South Seas Queen possesses the body (and not a bad one at that, judging by her frequent and, thankfully, gratuitous nudity) of an attractive Caucasian anthropologist in order to carry out a curse she placed on the great-granddaughter of one of her lovers from 100 years previously, and the possessed hottie, "The Lady Terminator", wipes out half of Jakarta to get at her. No one in their right mind watches movies like this for their story, acting, or comments on the human condition. You watch them to see a lot of shootouts, hot chicks, explosions, hot chicks, gore, hot naked chicks, stupid dialog and hot chicks who get naked while reciting stupid dialog, and this movie delivers all that in spades. "Good" and "bad" don't apply to films like this; they're beyond that kind of simplistic labeling. What they should be judged on is, do they deliver what they promise? And "Lady Terminator" certainly does that and more. You gotta see this one.

Yawn! Some of our fellow IMDb'ers simply don't have a sense of humor. Note previous reviews were so many haughtily sniff about how "bad" this movie is. Well, of course it's bad! But this film brings the old Mae West line to life... when it's bad, it is just so, so good.I was really impressed this Indonesian effort (not "India," as too many IMDb'ers had it) spent the effort and resources that are inconsistent with such outright B-movies. Probably some of it was stock footage, but we've got explosions, car chases and crashes, helicopters, and pure, non-stop action. In addition, the production deserves credit for rounding up the Caucasian actors in an effort to cater to the American market... since the actors were probably speaking the native language in the Indonesian version (there was obviously an English version, albeit still dubbed), I'd guess the call went out to the round eyes who happened to be living in the country. Sure, the plastic pretty boy hero would give Hollywood a run for its unimaginative casting money (where even today's character actors have to look superficially beautiful), but I appreciated the "Lady Terminator," Barbara Anne Constable, very much. Not only did she have the right curves, but she put her heart into the kick-ass role. She certainly lived up to the name of one of the titles of the film, "Nasty Hunter," by targeting the most sensitive part of the male anatomy. I also liked the totally one-dimensional character of "Snake," the prototypical stoned surfer dude. What a boneheaded film... but what a treat.