Awfully Good: Lady Terminator

Fun Fact: This week’s movie also goes by the titles NASTY HUNTER and SNAKE TERMINATOR: THE SNAKE WENCH DIES TWICE!

Lady Terminator (1989)

Director: H. Tjut Djalil
Stars: Barbara Anne Constable, Christopher J. Hart, Adam Stardust

Is there a plot?

James Cameron’s THE TERMINATOR + Estrogen + Indonesia x Vagina Eels = This Movie.

What’s the damage?

LADY TERMINATOR isn’t just influenced by THE TERMINATOR, it’s literally a direct remake with more Asian people. This Indonesia ripoff lifts shots, plot points and even lines from the original—pretty much everything except Arnold Schwarzenegger’s penis. The villain is an unstoppable killing machine intent on destroying a female target. She arrives in our dimension completely naked (yay!). Someone even says “Come with me if you want to live.” But there’s one little difference between James Cameron’s sci-fi opus and this movie.

You’ve got red on you.

That difference is Vagina Eels. No that’s not the greatest punk band name of all time. We mean literal water snakes located in private lady parts. You see, the “Terminator” in this movie isn’t really a robot; she’s the South Sea Queen–an evil succubus of Indonesian folklore that kills men with her sex. Kinda like Natasha Henstridge in SPECIES, the legendary lady seduces men with nudity, engages in coitus and then unleashes eels from whence inside her to bite their penises until they die from penis biting. And on top of that she also uses machine guns to kill people. That’s not fair.

Cameron Diaz without makeup.

Though the movie may seem like an excuse for gratuitous sex scenes, there’s also a pretty terrible story to follow. It opens with some nonsense about a prophecy where the South Seas Queen will come back to kill the great granddaughter of the man who sent her back to Hell. Cut to three generations later and a bikini-clad anthropologist is investigating the legend when a tsunami drags her underwater. She wakes up erotically tied to a bed in the South Seas Queen’s lair, whereupon an eel slithers through her underwear in a terrible digital effect that might as well be Japanese hardcore porn. Soon the former scientist emerges buck naked from the ocean, now fully possessed and hell bent on killing the great granddaughter and anyone who gets in her way. (Her first victims are two drunk guys watching each other pee. It’s pretty disturbing , even before the sex death happens.)

“Oh why oh why did you have sex with Cameron Diaz without makeup?”

Soon a group of wisecracking cops begins to wonder why they keep running in to dead bodies with no dicks. The one out-of-place white guy on the Indonesian police force begins to piece everything together and discovers the great granddaughter in peril. The two get to know each other for a few minutes, he tells her about his dead wife and they immediately have sex in the open forest while dew and flower petals fall on them. The rest of the movie involves the cop (aka Kyle Reese) protecting her from certain destruction from the title character.

There’s nothing about this picture I don’t automatically love.

Apparently Indonesia’s major exports include unlimited freaking ammo, because nobody in LADY TERMINATOR ever needs to reload their weapons. This leads to some truly ridiculous violence. Why shoot a guy one time when you can unload hundreds of bullets into his body at close range, then kick his lifeless corpse in the crotch for good measure? That’s how a real ruthless killing machine does it. (Though the fact that it happens to the one black guy in the movie is a bit racist.) In fact, the body count is so high it makes you wonder if this was all really necessary. While the cop protects the girl, innocent bystanders are constantly getting slaughtered wherever they go. It’s a personal vendetta, so presumably all this would end after Lady Terminator kills her. And it’s not like with John Connor where he goes on to be important to humanity. This is just some random chick whose family had it coming.

Even Snake couldn’t take his eyes off his own mullet.

Everything culminates in the end when the cop’s American friends show up with tanks, helicopters and a disturbing arsenal of weaponry. Even though they know the Lady Terminator can’t be killed by traditional means (it requires a special dagger or something stupid like that), the ragtag gang of mercenaries proceeds to turn Indonesia in to their personal war zone. Which brings me to my favorite part of the movie: Snake, the man with the golden mullet, played by perfectly-named actor Adam Stardust. Snake is only the movie for a couple scenes, but he leaves one hell of an impression. I dare you not to fall in love with his ginger mane blowing in the wind as he rides atop a tank, or swoon as he says in his surfer drawl, “Yeah! Eat it,you bitch.” The fact that this was Stardust’s only role is one of history’s great disappointments.