Lady Terminator (1989)

I am a fan of bad movies. I’ve been fueling myself on various exploitation entries for years, but upon finally watching this ridiculous film, I was inspired to write about them.  This one is no joke, you guys.   It’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s keep it simple.  Lady Terminator is, according to most summaries, an Indonesian homage to, or remake of, James Cameron’s 1984 classic The Terminator.  Let’s see if the plot rings any bells:

An anthropology student is doing research in the Indonesian south seas.  We know she’s an anthropologist because she tells a male coworker repeatedly, “I’m not a lady, I’m an ANTHROPOLOGIST.”  Fair enough.  She dons a bathing suit and scuba gear, and sets about diving when she is quickly and inexplicably transported to an underwater bedchamber.  Here, a (poorly) computer-animated snake creature penetrates her bikini bottom and possesses her with the demon of the South Seas Witch.  That’s right.  We’re witnessing an act of VDP – Vaginal Demonic Possession.  VDP is real, you guys.  And it took a brave Indonesian filmmaker named Jalil Jackson to bring this hot-button social issue into the public light.  I know – EXACTLY like The Terminator, right?  And now, possessed with said vaginal demonic spirit, she’s an unstoppable killing machine.

From here on out, it actually does follow the story of the original Terminator pretty closely, from our Lady Terminator’s nude emergence to a nightclub shootout scene, an eye-gouging scene, and even a male hero saying “Come with me if you want to live.”  The big difference here is a whole lotta dudes getting murdered via dong mutilation.  Not kidding – if you’re a guy in this movie, protect your pouch because Lady Terminator is on a mission to DESTROY it!  That’s what VDP does to a community, apparently: it puts all nearby dongs at risk.  Now if you choose, as I do, to view this as a feminist twist on the action genre, you’ll be happy to know that the first few guys to suffer Death By Dong are pretty creepy and rapey so they probably had it coming.  But as the film progresses, even I have to admit that the morality of all this member mutilation gets a little more murky.  As the body count rises, so too does the collateral dong damage.  Like this poor guy, a nice fella really, who gets machine gunned to the man-beans:

Ouch.

By this point in the film we’ve seen thousands of rounds of spent ammo, and there’s thousands more to come.  There’s fire, explosions, car crashes…in short, everything.  And just when we think the Lady Terminator has run out of ammo, she shows us another trick:

Shooting laser beams out of her FUCKING EYES.  !!!!  Where the hell did this come from?  Who cares.  It’s fucking awesome.

There’s also this dude’s mullet, which he sports in all seriousness for the entire movie.

Where the hell did this come from?  Again, who cares.  It’s fucking awesome….but probably from Indonesia.

Synopsis:  vaginal demonic possession, breasts, blood, bullets, dong mutilation, fire, explosions galore, rocket launchers, car crashes, helicopter crashes, burn victims, impromptu eye surgery, friendship, and fucking laser eyes.

On a scale of Disney to Crank 2, this movie is Shitballs Insane.  Off the charts.

5 katanas*

*n. a Japanese sword.   5-point rating system inspired by one of the best bad movies, Samurai Cop