Lady Terminator
1989
Directed by H. Tjut Djalil

Sometimes you hear about an awesome terrible movie and when you go to see it, it ends up just being a terrible terrible movie.  I say that because I want you to understand how sincerely I mean it when I say this: Lady Terminator is an awesome terrible movie.  Really awesome, in fact, and also really terrible.  Lady Terminator is an ’80s Indonesian horror film/rip-off of Terminator, with director Jalil Jackson (a.k.a. H. Tjut Djalil) taking whatever little bits he liked from that film and combining them with little bits from Indonesia’s legend of the South Sea Queen to create a story that makes very little sense.  I’m going to do my best to synopsize this so you guys can know what you’re missing out on right now, so just try and follow me.  Okay, so the movie starts with the South Sea Queen 100 years ago in her seaside castle following her normal routine of having sex with a man and then killing him with the eel inside her vagina if she doesn’t please him, as so many young women do.  Then some white guy shows up, has sex with her that she finds pleasing until he grabs the eel out of her vagina and turns it into a dagger.  The South Sea Queen gets infuriated and does what any scorned woman would do: she runs into the sea and promises to return in 100 years to have revenge on that man’s great-granddaughter, because obviously that’s better revenge than just killing the guy who actually stole your vagina eel while he’s right there in your castle.  100 years later, an unsuspecting anthropology student (Barbara Anne Constable) travels into the South Sea to find remains of the Queen’s castle underwater, but instead ends up naked tied to a bed so that the Queen’s eel can crawl into her vagina and the Queen can live again.  With her new body, the Queen stalks Erica (Claudia Rademaker), the white guy’s great-granddaughter and a budding pop star, killing everyone who stands in her way.  Erica finds help, though, in Max (Christopher Hart), an American cop working in Indonesia to escape the pain of his first wife’s death.  But how can you kill an indestructible killing machine?  A mystical old man gives Erica the eel vagina dagger that might just do the trick, but don’t worry - there’s still a good hour of pointless firefights, countless dead people, plenty of destroyed cars and a blown up helicopter and tank before someone finally thinks to use it.  Lady Terminator, which also goes by the title Nasty Hunter, has all the terrible moviemaking traits that you could hope for: bad framing, bad lighting, awful editing, very obvious and awful voice dubbing that only occasionally matches up to the actual actors’ mouth movements (it is all in English, by the way, not Indonesian), bad acting by the actors who are actually onscreen, awesomely lame ’80s synth music including an entire lame ’80s pop song performance, and awesomely lame ’80s special effects (especially those involving vagina eels).  As in the best terrible movies, everything awful becomes brilliant because the people onscreen are so oblivious and earnest in their attempts that you can’t help but find it all endearing at the same time you find it hilarious and utterly baffling.  The parallels to Terminator are hilariously obvious - for example, at one point the dub actor for Max slips in a “Come with me if you want to live” while you can’t see the actor’s face onscreen.  The film deserves some credit for having decent live-action stunts, although the camera work and editing is so inept that you can hardly tell what’s going on whenever stunts happen.  And the film brings up so many interesting questions: Does having your penis bitten off by a vagina eel really kill you instantly?  What about being shot in the penis by a round from a machine gun?  Furthermore, why does Lady Terminator insist on shooting men in the penis?  Why do our heros keep trying to shoot her?  If the first time you shoot someone, she doesn’t die, do you really think shooting her hundreds more times will eventually do the trick?  And finally, why did society turn on the mullet?  I’ll answer that question for you: they saw mullets like the one on the character Snake in this film and saw how powerful and lustrous they were and knew that they could never achieve such a glorious mullet themselves and so they started making fun of them to mask their own mullet-defeciency and despair.  What else do you need to hear?  Lady Terminator reaches that special cult-classic range of being so terrible and ill-conceived that it magically becomes incredible.  This isn’t the best worst movie ever, but damn, it’s a lot closer than you might think.

Rating: ☀☀☀☀
Four out of five suns