Nasty Hunter

Perhaps it's best to describe "LADY TERMINATOR" as one of the whacked-out weirdest, most inept and certainly howl-worthy junk creations to come along since, well, since as long as one can remember.

What starts as a plodding and confusing back story of the curse of a South Seas dragon lady quickly machine-guns, backflips and explodes into a slapdash riff/ripoff/homage on 1984's "THE TERMINATOR" with a dash of voodoo black magic for good measure.

The story? A sultry vacationing anthropologist (actress AND the film's makeup artist Barbara Ann Constable) takes a dip in the sea and comes up for air both possessed AND nude - and ready to blow the hell out of Indonesia. Rendered invulnerable by the said watery witch, our new Lady Terminator is determined to avenge the ages-old curse by gun or by sex, and rack up an impressive (and awfully bloody) body count that puts Arnie's sci-fi original to absolute shame.

The paint-by-number script is lousy in a so-bad-it's-awful way in its collision of actual Indonesian legend and slavish mimicry of James Cameron's breakout action hit. The film's direction is chaotically messy and disjointed, and the performances are awe-inspiringly amateur. To make matters worse (or better) everyone in the film - even the Caucasian actors sprinkled in for a "international" flare - are all dubbed incredibly badly, making it one of the best "Mystery Science Theater 3000" episodes never made.

I'll give the film this - it clicks right along. There's not a lot of time for character development because there's gratuitous nudity and so many more explosions to squeeze in. For that you get your Rupiah's worth.

Completely bizarre and laughably incompetent, this is the stuff cult films are made of. It will make any pasty-skinned midnight movie lover very, very happy.

If you loved "OUT OF Africa", see "LADY TERMINATOR".

Lady Terminator (1989)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Indonesian rip-off of the James Cameron has a sea goddess using her "female parts" to cut off "male parts" but one brave man stands up to her, pulls the snake out of her vagina, which then turns into a knife and kills her. She swears vengeance on his great, great granddaughter. Flash-forward one hundred years and the unstoppable killing machine will stop at nothing to get the woman.

LADY TERMINATOR is a really, really awful movie on so many levels but thankfully it's so incredibly nuts that you can't help but have a great time with it. If you're looking for a more quality type of film then this here certainly isn't going to be your cup of tea because everything here is pretty bad from some insane dialogue to the laughable story and lets not even get into some of the various issues with the actual ripping off of the Cameron movie.

It's interesting to note just how much here is actually ripped off. I mean, not only do we get lines like "Come with me if you want to live" but entire sequences are ripped off from the Cameron movie. It's clear that the filmmakers here didn't care and that their end result seemed to be just making sure this movie was more violent than Cameron's. The action scenes here contain all sorts of gunfire and explosions but the amount of blood on display is just great fun for those who enjoy such things. One simple bullet leads to a gallon of blood being sprayed. Not only that but we get some of the weirdest sex scenes that lead to various men's body parts being removed.

If you're looking for great performances then you had better look elsewhere. With that said, Barbara Anne Constable plays the villain and she's actually quite good in the part. Not to mention she offers up a lot of nude scenes to add to the exploitation and we all know that this here is never a bad thing. The dialogue itself is beyond awful and it too gets a lot of laughs. LADY TERMINATOR isn't a movie that was made to win Oscars. It's a crazy, non-stop violent and downright silly rip-off that manages to be quite entertaining.

"Lady Terminator" is seriously funny stuff. Because it is not played for laughs, it is really hilarious, with it's staccato dubbing. "I'm not a lady, I'm an Anthropologist". The plot is absolutely bananas, and trying to describe it would be futile. Think of it as a series of almost unrelated scenes, that somehow work on their own. The film oozes with excitement, even if none of it makes any sense. The photography is glitzy, the stunts in many cases burn up ridiculous plastic models, and the policeman hero looks like a Kier Dullea clone. None of this matters however, because you might die laughing watching this terrible movie masterpiece. - MERK

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.