Released in Indonesia as Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan ("Revenge of the South Seas Queen"), the film awkwardly grafts Terminator sci-fi action to a famous Javanese legend about a man-hungry, sexually insatiable underwater beauty, the subject of countless Indonesian movies and comic books. In Lady Terminator, Tanya (Barbara Anne Constable), a beautiful anthropologist working on her thesis, investigates the legend, only to become possessed by the South Seas Queen (an Indonesian actress who resembles Irene Cara) while scuba diving. Transformed into Lady Terminator, she makes her way to Jakarta, seducing men and eating them for breakfast: with the eel-like entity inside her, she devours their penis during intercourse.

Mainly, the Queen seeks vengeance against a rising pop idol Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker), who as it turns out is the great-granddaughter of a warrior who aroused the Queen's wrath a century before, or something. Clean-cut homicide detective Max McNeil (Christopher J. Hart), a widower, comes to Erica's aid and falls in love with her just as Lady Terminator zeroes in on her target.

The DVD is the work of Mondo Macabro, a label with an obvious and infectious affinity for obscure horror and third world exploitation. Though not a bad introduction to the wacky wonders of Indonesian grindhouse cinema, Lady Terminator's main failing is that it's too imitative of its inspiration while lacking the distinctive local flavor that make the wildest Indonesian films so appetizing.

Such as it is, Lady Terminator is actually pretty competent -- see Ron Ford's appalling if occasionally amusing A Passion to Kill (aka Turborator, 1999) for rock-bottom faux-Terminator shoddiness. Here, at least director Tjut Djalil keeps the action moving and his shrewd, efficient blocking and cutting of scenes hide many of the low-budget flaws. The script, while derivative, is reasonably coherent. Of course the fact that The Terminator is a machine and the South Seas Queen is a supernatural character doesn't stop the latter from behaving like a robot, at one point even performing eye surgery on herself for no clear reason.

About half the cast are English-speaking westerners of the Robert Dunham variety and most of the film appears to have been shot silent and looped in post-production. The dubbing is painfully obvious but not awful, certainly better than the sort found in most other Asian films, and about on par with Italian Westerns and giallo thrillers. To this end it's hard to gauge the performances, except to say that Constable's a knock-out, Rademaker's cute and Hart's like cardboard.

Video & Audio

Lady Terminator is presented in 16:9 anamorphic format, and while the print is a little dog-eared, overall the image is good for such an obscure picture. A bigger problem is the digital artifacting, which is very noticeable some of the time and mildly distracting. This has been an issue on several Mondo Macabro titles and easily fixable, so here's hoping it's not a problem on subsequent titles. The Dolby mono score is acceptable. There are no subtitles or alternate audio options.

Extra Features

If Lady Terminator lacks the bravado of genre classics like Mystics in Bali (Leak, 1981), Mondo Macabro's extra features more than compensate. Best is a terrific 24-minute documentary, also in 16:9 format, that puts the Indonesian film industry into historical and political context, tracing the rise quota quickies, the influence of Indonesian comic books, the resourcefulness of their craftspeople, to the industry's gradual decline in the early-1990s. Written and directed by Pete Tombs and Andy Starke in 2004, the featurette boasts good interviews with industry insiders: producers Raam Punjabi and Sunil Samtani; director Tjut Djalil; actors Barry Prima, Inneke Koesherawati and Lydia Kandou; screenwriter Imam Tantowi; art director/spfx whiz El Badrun; and film critic Aris Sofran Siagian. It's a great little documentary, on par with the best from Blue Underground, and features wild clips from The Warrior (Jaka Sembung, 1981), Mystics in Bali, Satan's Slave (Pengabdi setan, 1982), The Devil's Sword (1985), and Dangerous Seductress (1993).

Next up is an English-audio trailer with Japanese text, looking suspiciously like it was reformatted from an older 4:3 source. The trailer offers two alternate titles: the Japanese release version was apparently called Snake Terminator (Suneeku taamineetaa) while English text calls the film Nasty Hunter.

Also included are a few minutes of alternate scenes, in 4:3 format, designed for prudish foreign markets, and the usual Mondo Macabro previews. An especially good Text Pages section offers an essay on the genre by Pete Tombs, a Tjut Djalil filmography, background on the Legend of the South Seas Queen, and a photo gallery.

Parting Thoughts

Lady Terminator is like a travelling carnival: cheap, crude, and a rip-off, but also hard to resist. The extras push this into "recommended" territory, and make one hunger for more Indonesian wonders from Mondo Macabro.

Stuart Galbraith IV is a Los Angeles and Kyoto-based film historian whose work includes The Emperor and the Wolf -- The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. His new book, Cinema Nippon will be published by Taschen in 2005.