All Rise...

Judge David Johnson eagerly awaits the sequel, The Tramp Terminator.

The Charge

First she mates, then she terminates.

Opening Statement

It's like The Terminator, see, except with a lady. Making sense now?

Facts of the Case

Millions and millions of years ago, or maybe sooner, the Queen of the South Sea reigned supreme in her South Sea Palace. A sorceress of frightening evil, the Queen was all-powerful and terrible and unshaven. Any man that would attempt to pleasure her met with a bloody, vague death. Until one day some stud was brought in to try his luck at taming the Queen with his mighty endowment. Amazingly, he accomplished what no man had done—he satisfied the Queen. Then he killed her. But as the Queen disappeared into the netherworld, she uttered a curse on the stud's lineage…

…which brings us to modern-day Indonesia. A nubile young diver (Barbara Anne Constable) is nosing around the former stomping grounds of the Queen. Suddenly, she's grabbed in a mystical headlock and thrown on a bed, where the incarnate sprit of the evil Queen appears in the form of a snake. And then it's into the vagina.

The Lady Terminator has been born!

She emerges from the ocean totally nude, and finds her first victims: a pair of drunken young idiots publicly urinating. Either too inebriated or too hard-up for sex, the guys engage in some casual intercourse with the weird naked woman who just walked out from the ocean yet maintains a flawless perm. She promptly kills both kids, takes their clothes, and begins the hunt for the cursed girl.

Fortunately for the unsuspecting target, she's befriended a strapping young bad-ass cop (Christopher Hart), who becomes her de facto protector. It's not long before Lady Terminator tracks down her prey, and from there, it's an unending battle between the cop and his mullet-sporting friends and the unstoppable female punk rocker, where the bullets never run out, the dialogue doesn't seem to match mouths, and nary a bystander will survive!

The Evidence

Ha! What a crappy movie. The last Indonesian film I caught was Troma's release of The Stabilizer, and from what I've seen, this country makes movies about as well as I make Mercedes-Benzes.

However, what Lady Terminator lacks in coherence it more than makes up for in gunfire. The final third of this film, about half an hour's worth (the movie's a merciful 88 minutes long), is one continuous stream of violence. Beginning in a crowded mall where many a hapless shopper gets gunned down, and continuing into a car chase, a helicopter explosion (to which one of the good guys responds by emoting like a rusted-out Volkswagen and saying: "He was my buddy"), a propane inferno, a full-frontal assault with automatic weapons on a member of Bananarama—oh wait, that's the Lady Terminator, the senseless slaughter of a man with a mullet so huge he looks like a Clydesdale, and eventually the final face-off between the hero, the girl, and the Lady Terminator, the film's final act will leave you wondering why guns in Indonesia never run out of ammunition.

Prior to this balls-to-the-wall spectacle, the Lady Terminator makes good on her tagline, bangs a few blokes along the way, carves out her eyeball and washes it under the tap, and meditates topless.

The film certainly borrows liberally from James Cameron's flick: Witness the Lady Terminator tear up a police precinct! Gasp as the Lady Terminator emerges from a fiery explosion, her skin melted! Guffaw as our hero says "Come with me if you want to live!"

In fact you could probably make the argument that the sole difference between that film and this one is that Arnold Schwarzenegger wasn't having sex with overweight middle-aged Indonesian men.

Mondo Macabro, a studio that specializes in carting all forms of worldwide cinematic weirdness stateside, has provided a righteous treatment for this film. An anamorphic widescreen format gives the Lady the juice to make her vengeance crusade as fine-looking as possible. The print is seriously dated, but the picture doesn't suffer too much. Scenes from the LT's point of view (tinted red—it's like looking through the eyes of someone with massive ocular blood clots) are a little murky, but overall it's a good effort from the studio. The 2.0 stereo mix is high-pitched and shallow, with little bass used. The sound does not fill your room.

A few nifty extras accompany the film, including an educational documentary on Indonesian "Exploitica," a few alternate scenes, production notes, a still gallery, and some previews.

Closing Statement

Eighties trash something fierce, Lady Terminator has it all: sex, violence, hairstyles that should be outlawed in the free world, and eyes shooting laser beams. Be warned, however, that in the end, what may be terminated are you brain synapses.

The Verdict

Mondo Macabro is found guilty of second-degree assault with a Trash Movie, in the first degree.

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