Lady Terminator

Oh me, oh my. Where to begin?

Sometimes, someone recommends you a film and it's pretty good. You note down the recommendation, you go off and watch it and you are pleased. This friend of yours made a good recommendation.


Sometimes however, the recommended film is so mind-bendingly brilliant/bizarre that you are left in shock; you are almost angry that no-one has recommended this film before. Lady Terminator was made 1983. That means it has existed for all 21 years of my life. With this firmly in mind, how is it possible that I haven't seen it before? The world has been hiding a gem from me!

I'll try and sell it to you: it's an 80s Indonesian exploitation action-movie, that robs heavily from Cameron's Terminator and can't quite work out whether it's set in New York or Indonesia. If that doesn't sell it to you, I don't know what will. I guess if that summary isn't appealing then it probably just isn't your kind of film; you're missing out.





In a tour-de-force of sublime bonkers-ness, Lady Terminator mixes bizarre Asian folklore with unstoppable killing machines. The (entirely unecessary) back-story presents us with an angry goddess-lady who, defeated by some guy, swears revenge on his grand-daughter (yes... so far so odd). She achieves this by er.... throwing her soul into a bit of the sea and hoping that something will happen.

Something does indeed happen: young anthropology student, Tania, goes diving in the area and is posessed by the soul of this rogue goddess, returning to surface as a murderous beast on a killing rampage. Oh yeah, she's also pretty much totally invincible. Cue long gunfights, a ridiculously brilliant body-count and blood splatters all over the place.





I really did enjoy this film so much that it pains me to say anything bad about it. Yes, the vast majority of the special effects are crappy, yes, the acting is basically atrocious, yes, the dubbing leaves much to be desired.... but all these complaints are missing the point. What we have here is a brilliant mix of crazy fantasy and Terminator imitation that is enormously fun for all of its 80 minute run-time.

I can't recommend it highly enough.