LADY TERMINATOR – With all the recent Terminator talk going on, how could I resist pulling out 'Lady Terminator', acme of T-101 rip offs and certainly a film from which James Cameron could learn a thing or two. An anthropologist goes looking for evidence of a local legend. Her travels take her underwater, where she ends up being possessed by an ancient spirit with a retractable penis-biting snake. Returning to the mainland, she pulls on some biker leathers, grabs a machine gun, and goes looking for the recipient of a hundred year old curse, an eighties pop star. Loads of people get shot. An incredibly wooden police officer is called upon. Sex ends in blood spray and (off screen) penis-biting-by-retractable-snake. Endless volleys of bullets resound in hotels, shopping malls and police stations. Lasers shoot from a mangled hag's eyes – how VHS is that? Finally, “Shit blow up”. LT is a bit like a film that might only exist in a dream, except it's real (apparently). It's an Indonesian exploitation film from the late eighties which sells itself both as an exploration of indigenous mythology (the back story is 'The Legend of the South Sea Queen') and as an action sci-fi extravaganza. It can only really pretend to be either. The Terminator style bits aren't done well, and don't make sense. They're entirely out of context. But they're there. They kind of sum up the credo of 'Lady Terminator' as a whole. Because, make no mistake, although it's not ludicrously cheap looking, LT is certainly a bad, bad movie. Acting, dialogue, editing, pace, feel and concept – all awful. But it's an awfulness beamed in from an eighties wonderland, a rock video world of perms, dry ice and soft focus neon. So it has that uncanny dreaminess born of stilted, fractured badness unfolding against those unreal textures. It can't hope to be a 'Miami Connection' or a 'Samurai Cop' in terms of movie psychosis. It's just not up there. It's in a not too distant orbit though, perhaps nearer that part of the movie cosmos where Bruno Mattei and Godfrey Ho sail by, beaming messages no-one really understands into a black, endless void. Woah, I'm gonna have to stop this celestial bollocks, it's only a movie. Come down. Say something sensible. But what sensible thing is there to be said about this eminently not-sensible movie? Apart from, that is – see it, if you haven't already. The Terminator series might boast objectively better cinema, but in some strange way I prefer 'Lady Terminator', which pushes buttons the likes of Cameron couldn't even find.
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