Lady Terminator

Terminate Her

Lady Terminator
aka Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan
Indonesia 1989
Directed by H. Tjut Djalil
108 Sound Studio 
Mondo Macabro DVD 0

Warning: Spoilers I guess... it’s not that kind of movie.

I’ve been meaning to catch up to Lady Terminator for a couple of decades now. After a point, I decided to not grab the old Mondo Macabro DVD because I thought, surely a film as cool sounding as this would be getting a Blu Ray release soon? Well, apparently not. I recently listened to a Mondo Macabro podcast from a couple of years ago and, apparently, while they’d like to do a Blu Ray, there are some rights issues on that format so, that’s torpedoed for a while, it would seem. So, yeah, I eventually sourced the old DVD copy least. And, yeah, the picture is a little softer than I would have liked but it’s still quite watchable. 

Okay, so this is not quite in the realms of a ‘so bad it’s good movie’ because, some of the production values for the time aren’t too terrible (I mean, they’re also not great but, yeah, watchable). This is, it has to be said, more of a ‘so silly it’s good’ kind of movie and, anyone who knows me will known that silliness is a quality I treasure highly. And this is, indeed, an attempt to blend mythical Indonesian goddess legend The Queen Of The South Seas (in a slightly changed variant, from what I can tell, after having read about some of these stories) and transplanting it into a... ‘not even trying to hide it’, blatant riff on James Cameron’s The Terminator. Just without even the relatively low budget that first movie had and, you know, without the time travel aspect. The film even has it emblazoned on the credits... Original story from The Legend Of The South Sea Queen.

The pre-credits sequence depicts an actress called Fortunella playing The Queen Of The South Seas in days gone by. In her ‘under the sea’ but sometimes floating on the surface castle, she kills another in a long line of lovers during intercourse. Now at first I believed this was just a case of ‘vagina dentata’ when she bites the man’s cock off with her undercarriage and, that’s certainly what I’d been led to believe by the aforementioned podcast. But, no, the Goddess lady just has a big, bitey snake living up in her genitalia. Although it seems to do a lot of ‘arterial spray kind of damage’ to the men in question. Which leads her to ask the question... “Is there any man who can satisfy me?”

Well be careful what you wish for because... her 100th lover, a wizardish chap, pulls the snake from her sexy bits before it can do the damage. She promptly vanishes but not before putting a curse on him, telling him his great, great granddaughter will die from her hand. 

Roll credits and then, after they've played out, we are transplanted to modern day (1989) Indonesia, where a young anthropology student played by Barbara Anne Constable is researching the legend and, ends up sinking to her sea castle, being magically tied up to the Queen’s bed and then having a badly cartooned snake penetrating her bikini bottoms and up into her crotch. The idea being that this has turned her into a minion of the South Sea Queen to seek out and extract her revenge on the great, great granddaughter. Oh, and it also somehow turns her into a machine-like cyborg, as we see her rise naked from the sea and sex up two local men, who both are killed using exactly the same MO as the original lady... having their penises lopped off by the incisors of the snake in her undercarriage. Not a machine snake though... it’s all a bit odd, to tell the truth. The police autopsy report later says... “Cocks bitten off by eels.” so, yeah, make your mind up people!

Okay, we then cut to the great, great granddaughter, local song singer celebrity Erica, played by Claudia Angelique Rademaker (from what I can tell, the IMDB really is bad at trying to figure out who’s who on non-American movies). When Lady Terminator comes for her in a crowded bar, the bullet count is high and she’s only just rescued by hero cop Max, her new love interest played by Christopher J. Hart. It’s amazing how most of these actors and actresses only have this one film to their credit. 

The film then becomes a chase and a series of action sequences, punctuated by the occasional sex scenes and, of course, it includes some additional male member chomping action. Lady T seems obsessed with destroying men’s genitalia much of the time, it has to be said. At one point she riddles a cop with plentiful machine gun bullets until he’d deader than dead but, still takes a second to kick him in the balls before moving on. Another cop is riddled with machine gun bullets in his testicle region too. This lady is really going balls to the wall in this movie, for sure! 

But, of course, it also has to hit all those ‘similarities’ to The Terminator. So she uses the police band to track them, drives through the wall of the police station and crushes a cop against the wall in the process and even has a scene where she slices out her damaged eye with a scalpel in a mirror, before fixing said eyeball and returning it, after she heals it with her electricity eyeball powers. Oh, right, I forgot to mention those. These are the same eyeball powers which enable her to shoot lasers from her eyes in later scenes, just like the main antagonist in Mausoleum (reviewed here). The film even has one of the cops say to the granddaughter, “Come with me if you want to live.” So, yeah, like I said, the film is pretty up front about what it’s trying to rip off here for sure. 

And I loved every minute of it. This one is a comic romp that doesn’t seem to know it’s comical but, that’s okay, the silliness is infectious and I’d have to say that Lady Terminator is definitely the very definition of a ‘switch your brain off’ movie. In fact, I’d say if you did try to watch it while your brain was engaged, you might come away very confused. A solid recommendation from me though and, yeah, hoping those Blu Ray rights issues get cleared up at some point because I would love a high definition copy of this one. An absolute banger for an all nighter of a movie screening, that’s for sure.