Touches You

Fresh and Exciting

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Blistering performances.

All hell breaks loose in Indonesia when an American anthropologist named Tania (Constable in her only credited movie role) travels there to uncover the legend of the South Sea Queen. It turns out the myths and legends of the area are true when Tania becomes possessed by the Queen's malevolent spirit. Before you know it, she's dressed in black leather, has an assault rifle with endless ammo and will go in any public space and begin shooting up the place. When she attacks an up and coming pop star named Erica (Rademaker in her only movie) while she's performing live, a cop named Max (Hart in HIS only movie) comes to her rescue and they go on the run. Ignoring the fact that Tania cannot be killed, Max assembles a team of his finest warriors/buddies and they break out the tanks and missile launchers on her. Because her "spirit is too strong", it's going to take more than brute force to stop this particular reincarnation. But can she be stopped? Find out today! Lady Terminator is a wildly entertaining and fun movie that you just can't resist. It has plenty of exotic charm, thanks to its Indonesian locales and indigenous legends (and a cool 80's look to go along with that), but since the movie was primarily made to be exported, it's interesting to see the filmmakers give what they thought the rest of the world wanted - endless machine gun shooting with super-high body counts, nudity, and off-kilter weirdness a-plenty. Thankfully, this mixture of local culture and international aspirations resulted in a one-of-a-kind movie that must be seen.The movie doesn't skimp on the action, and plenty of our favorite items are on show: screaming while shooting a machine gun (in this case in a tank!), an exploding helicopter, the disco scene (this one in particular is a winner because it mixes in some action to an extended version of Erica's song), some awesome Aerobics clothing that Erica and her friend Marianne wear, and the icing on the cake is the killer acting/dubbing, featuring some memorable lines that deserve to be quoted ("Does this place serve beer or just milk?", "I've seen more dead bodies than you've eaten hot dogs", etc.). It's easy to see why the producers PROUDLY present the movie, as it states in the opening credits. And in case you get confused, there's a few sentences of voice-over narration at the beginning and end of the movie from an unknown, unseen voice. It will send you into a philosophical tailspin if you let it.While Constable does a bang-up job as the Lady Terminator - and her pre-Terminator phase of innocence (her strange insistence on being known as an anthropologist even takes precedence over her gender) - truly the movie belongs to Snake. Who is Snake? He's one of Max's cop buddies on the force, and a more totally radical, awesome dude you have not seen. He wears only tight denim, has amazing hair, and talks like Michaelangelo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There's a name in the credits, Adam Stardust, and we're sincerely hoping that's the guy that plays Snake, but we're not sure. But who else could it be? God bless Mondo Macabro for releasing this on DVD. Their support for this movie made it possible for the maximum amount of people to see it in its correct version, and we truly salute them for it. And there are some nice extras on the disc too. So if you don't own it already, go on Amazon post-haste and add this gem to your collection!

***SPOILERS*** "Lady Terminator" (aka. "Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan") of 1988 is a wonderful Trash flick that is both hilariously inept and outrageously entertaining and awesome. The film is basically the epitome of Trash-cinema - of what we love about trash-cinema, that is. "Lady Terminator" shamelessly plagiarizes whole parts of the 1984 classic "The Terminator" and it does not make the slightest attempt to hide this plagiarism. And it does so in a manner that is impossible not to love for a fan of cult-cinema. The film already begins oddly, with an odd quote, and a bizarre 'South Sea Queen' (a sort of evil deity/witch) who kills her lovers during sex in a quite... unorthodox manner. Her 100th husband, however, manages to break her spell by giving her an orgasm and pulling a snake (!) out of her vagina. The evil Queen then vows to take revenge on his great-great-granddaughter, before walking to the bottom of the sea for a hundred years... (Awesomely) Odd enough, and all this happens before the film even really begins. One hundred years later, a sexy anthropology student named Tania (Barbara Anne Constable) decides to travel to the place in the sea, where the South Sea Queen is supposed to reside - and is subsequently turned into an indestructible killing machine with the sole purpose of killing the great-great-granddaughter, who happens to be a sexy bar-singer...The film's storyline is extremely odd, to say at least, and this oddity, as well as the absolutely delightful trashiness. The film is so obviously ripping off "The Terminator" that one could easily call it plagiarism - but so what? Which film would be a better model for rip-offs than the 1984 cult classic, and what would be a greater rip-off than this gem of trash-cinema. The film includes extreme bloodshed and everything else one would desire in a trash flick - sleaze, gore, odd dialogue, weird characters, delightfully inept performances and an enormous amount of camp cult material. Lady Terminator mows down hundreds of people with Machine Guns throughout the film. Funnily, the access to fully automatic weapons is quite easy in the film (in Indonesia Uzis seem to be the standard equipment of every hotel clerk. When not massacring people in places like malls or police stations, the lethal lady (Barbara Ann Constable) kills people by squashing their willies during sex, and does quite about everything that Arnold Schwarzenegger did in "Terminator" (including a self-inflicted eye-operation, and for no apparent reason). The actions taken by everybody else are completely illogical (in the beginning, for example, an elderly man gives Tanja a book that describes the way to the South Sea Queen's residence - even though he is aware of what will happen). Besides Barbara Ann Constable, Claudia Angelique Rademaker makes another nice female lead as the target Erica, the sexy bar singer. The terrible 80s hairstyles even increase the wonderfully trashy 80s flair. Among other odd characters, "Lady Terminator" also features a guy with the ugliest mullet ever caught on screen. Overall, "Lady Terminator" is positively one of the stupidest films ever - and one of the most immensely entertaining at the same time. No lover of Exploitation/Trash/Cult-cinema should miss this gem of camp extravaganza!

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".

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.