Lady Terminator is an Indonesian action myth-fi, based loosely on stories of the South Sea Queen, reinterpreted with central images borrowed from James Cameron's Terminator. It shares the action spectacle excess of outrageous Hollywood action films and the sloppy short-hand dramatics of a poorly written b-film. It was my first Indonesian genre film. My understanding is that there was a wave of these types of productions in Indonesia, and seeing this movie and later learning this feels like discovering treasure chests on the seabed of cinema.
The riches of this film are found in the execution of the material, its performance as a film narrative. It's written for an audience, by a filmmaker who thinks as an audience member, particularly an audience member seeing the movie in a mall or multiplex, the populist, consumerist audience member. It's written and directed to be this kind of mainstream formulaic movie, but the filmmaker fucks it up in a thousand exciting and different ways that make the film a thousand times more interesting than those movies usually are. For me the idea of a Hollywood style film from a non-Hollywood location is richly compelling, as with genre films from the southern United States, Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, France, etc., because parts of the filmmaker's outsider personality will inherently corrode the mechanization of material that's such an annoying and artless feature of many Hollywood films themselves. The filmmakers who attempt to curb this natural tendency are the bad ones, the ones as bad as the Hollywood filmmakers. The filmmakers who make movies like Lady Terminator are gems, treasures of the film world, unconscious documentarians of the human soul in flight from reality.
The movie wisely steals several attractive features from the Terminator series: the tech noir vibe, the unstoppable murdering machine (with compelling backstory), and key scenes, including the downtown car chase (!), are directly imitated.
Most of the heavy-duty action material is performed by an actress named Barbara Anne Constable, who apparently acted in several other regional films and never expected Lady Terminator to be seen overseas. Lady Terminator is her sole credit listed on IMDb.
Constable is badass in Lady Terminator, in presence and performance. She does things no other human being will likely ever do, with a gusto and brazenness that only a skilled and daring actress could bring to a role. It's impossible to imagine her character existing in the real world, and yet simultaneously easy to sense the presence of a personality and distinct acting choices beneath her performance - qualities that bring the unreal to life! Her character is a spirit-possessed human, and this allows acting space for a role previously played, in the Terminator series, as emotionally barren by consequence of robotics.
Like many other action b-films the dialogue is dramatically perfunctory and bridges together action scenes. Unlike many other action b-films the action is frequent and engaging. Its successes are easy to calculate: play the film before an audience and listen to them. I saw it at the end of a triple-feature that began with Master of the Flying Guillotine and Gates of Hell aka City of the Living Dead and this one was my favorite - and I really like the first two - because most of the components that contribute to the perception of this film as a failure are for me very entertaining, interesting, and human, and all the little blemishes are simply stimulators for my imagination and curiosity, as with the best of films.
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