Weirdhouse Cinema: Lady Terminator

In this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss the infamously wild 1988 Indonesian folk-horror mockbuster “Lady Terminator,” directed by Tjut Djalil and starring Barbara Anne Constable as the unstoppable machine gun-toting avatar of the South Sea Queen.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:16):
And this is Joe McCormick.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
For today's episode, I wanted to take our first steps
on Weird House Cinema into the world of Indonesian cinema
as I just recently returned from Indonesia. I'll share more
about that trip on subsequent episodes of Stuff to Blow
Your Mind, because I did get to experience some things
to tie into our core science episodes. But now having

(00:38):
enjoyed the natural beauty and hospitality of the Indonesian isles,
I also knew it was time to watch some of
its weirdest movies.

Speaker 3 (00:45):
You picked a real winner for us today, Rob, and
I'm not going to spoil it before you finish your
introduction to the film. But it's hard to imagine the
cinema of any country could get much weirder than the
movie we're talking about today.

Speaker 2 (00:57):
Well, you know, I think there's a strong case to
be made for weirder examples of Indonesian cinema, but this one,
I don't know. It lines up in several unique ways.
I mean, I'll go ahead and mention it here for
anyone who hasn't looked at the title of the episode
we were talking about the nineteen eighty eight Indonesian folk car, Mockbuster,
Lady Terminator. Yes, it is all of those things.

Speaker 3 (01:19):
It's like if you wanted James Cameron's Terminator but you
thought it didn't have enough ancient deep sea sex goddesses
in it.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Exactly, yes, And you might also think to yourself, Terminator
is good, but are there enough machine guns? Could there
be more machine guns? And you know, I dare say,
without actually going back and rewatching James Cameron's Terminator, I
think this film has more machine guns.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
I think that's without a doubt. And in fact, you
could you could sense moments in this movie. There's almost
like an anxiety you can feel going scene to scene
where it's like you since the filmmaker's wondering if they've
put enough gunfire into the scene yet, and so like
something will happen, characters will be talking, and then more
people will run into frame and start shooting guns again.

Speaker 2 (02:03):
It's crazy. Yeah, there's a point about between halfway and
two thirds into the film where it's just gonna be
machine guns for the duration and it never gets boring.

Speaker 3 (02:15):
Like to their credit, I've said this on the show before.
I can get quite bored with a movie that's just
shots of people shooting guns at each other like that
can get really tedious. This maintains a hilarious level of
novelty throughout all of the Act two and Act three
gun fights. It stays weird and it stays funny, and yeah,

(02:37):
it did not get boring for me at all.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Yeah, we tend to talk about exploitation films and b
films that are cut above the rest, so it is
worth stressing that exploitation cinema is exactly where you tend
to find excess taken to the level of boredom, like
films that have a lot of nudity, for example, But
it's just meaningless and boring after a while. And the

(03:02):
same with violence, the same with gore, the same with
profanity or whatever flavor you happen to be over indulging in.

Speaker 3 (03:09):
Yeah, it's very easy as a filmmaker to make them
to have the mistaken belief that like, violence is exciting,
and it's not true. Drama is exciting and violence can
be a form of drama. But but yeah, so a
lot of movies kind of go down that the wrong
path of just like lots of close ups of and
it just goes on, never really feels like it's building

(03:31):
to anything. This movie's action sequences are so bonker they
are bananas, and the dialogue during the action scenes especially
is some of the funniest stuff I can think of,
and I've seen in a B movie in a long time.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
Some aspects of the story might be confusing at times,
character motivations and so forth, but there were multiple points
during my rewatch where I really had to stop and
remind myself that, you know, this action scene is totally
sticking together. Though like I'm I'm totally invested in the
physical action that's happening on screen, they are totally delivering
when it comes to the action, all right. At this point,

(04:07):
I do want to take just one step back and
just briefly talk about Indonesian cinema with more of an
emphasis on some of the exploitation cinema that perhaps more
weird house cinema listeners are familiar with. But of course,
the Republic of Indonesia covers some seventeen thousand islands in
Southeast Asia and Oceania, entailing multiple ethnic groups and the

(04:29):
fourth largest population of any country on Earth.

Speaker 3 (04:31):
There are a lot of.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
People there, and as discussed in a documentary on Indonesian
exploitation cinema on the Mondo Macabro disc that I watched
the film on, they point out that, of course everyone
in Indonesia loves movies, as it can be said for
pretty much every country on Earth. Like movies are fun,
people get into them, and so distinctly Indonesian cinema I

(04:53):
was reading elsewhere dates back to the nineteen twenties, with
various domestic productions of note, but then heading into the
nineteen seventies, the market is dominated by foreign imports, films
from the West, from India, from East Asia, and so
during the nineteen seventies the Indonesian government decreed that in
order to import films, you also had to fund domestic productions,

(05:14):
and by nineteen seventy seven, according to that Mando Macabro documentary,
you had to make one Indonesian film in order to
import five international pictures.

Speaker 3 (05:23):
Wow. I was not prepared for there to be a
policy backstory to us talking about Lady Terminator.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
I mean, you know, there are a lot of factors
that go into a movie like this coming together and
obviously a lot of passion. I mean, there are so
many examples of films that have been made because of
some element of how they came together is because of
tax breaks or some economic production factor, some sort of
slush fund or what have you. But yeah, so this
is just one wrinkle to where we end up entering

(05:52):
into what many people describe as a Golden Age of
Indonesian genre film. A lot of these pictures were, you know,
just definitely aimed at the working class and then you know,
and then a young folk. They often included plots that
entailed mystical adventure, action, horror, maybe a little bit of sexuality,

(06:14):
and a lot of it was often colored by traditional folklore,
Indonesian history, Dutch colonialism, and of course international film influences
that range from American blockbusters and Hong Kong action films
to Bollywood musicals. And so the nineteen seventies and nineteen
eighties end up providing this rich hall of genre films,

(06:35):
and many of these would go on to be distributed internationally,
developed cult followings internationally, including pictures that a number of
you've probably are probably familiar with nineteen eighty six is
The Hungry Snake Woman starring Susanna who's like often described
as the as the scream Queen of Indonesia. Nineteen eighty
one's The Warrior starring Barry Prima, who's kind of often

(06:58):
talked about. I don't know who you'd direct compare him to,
but he was like the big the big male action
star of this time period. And then another major selection
from this era is nineteen eighty eight's Lady Terminator. Now,
as we've been talking about here, Lady Terminator isn't just
a mockbuster ripoff of nineteen eighty four. It's the Terminator.

(07:20):
I mean, it definitely is that.

Speaker 3 (07:21):
It very much is that. I mean in like recreating
scenes and moments from Terminator, like line for line or
shot for shot, sometimes right right.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
So it is definitely a Terminator mockbuster. But on the
other hand, it is again a a a horror movie
based on to some degree on Indonesian folklore, specifically tales
concerning the South Sea Queen. And I believe my apologies
if I'm mispronouncing this, but Naia e row row Key

(07:51):
Duel is I believe the Indonesian name for this specific entity.
And I was reading some other material about the South
Sea Queen one a Princess from Sunda published in Asian
Folklore Studies back in nineteen ninety seven by Robert Wessing,
and this author describes this entity as an exiled West

(08:13):
Javanese princess who then goes on to become the spirit
queen of the Indian Ocean. And as you might expect
with any kind of folklore tradition, she takes on different
roles and different tales and traditions. But in this film
we see are sort of boiled down to the form
of a vengeful sexual oceanic entity, almost perhaps a demon,

(08:33):
perhaps a divine force. I mean, the lines between these
distinctions are often grayed out.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
Kind of a super powerful saltwater succubus, like a sex
goddess witch who prays on men and commands all the
powers of the eel.

Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yes of the eel of the snake. Wessing does compare
her to various other traditions in this region and neighboring
regions concerning things sort of like mermaid aids and certainly
serpent women and the like. And I should also add
that in various other Indonesian films from this time period,
other you obviously you have hungry snake queens, you have

(09:09):
crocodile queens. So this does feel like it's perhaps a
familiar trope in Indonesian folklore and certainly in exploitation cinema,
based some degree on those folk tales. All right, well,
elevator pitch for this one. All I have to say
is the south Sea Queen cannot be reasoned with. She
doesn't feel pity or remorse or feared, and she absolutely

(09:30):
will not stop ever until you're dead.

Speaker 3 (09:33):
Or until her machine gun jams. And then she has
to make a poudy face?

Speaker 2 (09:38):
Does she do that? Does she make a powdy face?

Speaker 3 (09:40):
To be fair, that's not actually the south Sea Queen.
That is the embodiment of the south Sea queens magic,
or I don't know, you tell me. Is the south
Sea Queen herself inside the body of the Anthropologist that
is possessed and becomes Lady Terminator? Or is that just
sort of her magic is a curse place? Do you
know what I'm asking? Yeah, the south Sea Queen physically

(10:03):
there in the body of what's her name.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Yeah, it does seem like she is being puppeted to
some degree. Yeah, the character of what Tanya. I believe
that is her name, Tanya.

Speaker 3 (10:15):
The Anthropologist, the anthropomon is the Lady Terminator.

Speaker 2 (10:18):
Yes, yeah, I think this is a fair point. I
feel like maybe the South Sea Queen is not directly
inside there, but is like at a distance, the puppet
master of this vengeful avatar.

Speaker 3 (10:31):
The other thing is, does the South Sea Queen actually
turn her into a robot like the T eight hundred Interminator.
There are reasons for thinking that. For one thing, she
shoots lasers out of her eyes and seems to have
some kind of technological powers, like she gets at one point,
she kind of gets her her skin melted and seems
to have some kind of exoskeleton thing going on underneath there,

(10:54):
like in Terminator. But also there's no otherwise, there's no
technological tie in with the South Sea Queen. It would
seem to be just a magically possessed being. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
I get the impression that via magical possession, her body
has taken on various supernatural aspects that make it immune
to bullets, not completely immune to massive explosions as we'll see,
but somewhat immune. And then also at some point I
beams come into the phraser.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
Eyes Okay, yeah, those are magic laser eyes, not high
tech laser eyes.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Right, that's magical energy. That's like, I don't know, radiant
damage or something. All right, let's go ahead and listen
and just just a little bit of the trailer here,
not the whole thing, but just a little bit to
give folks a taste.

Speaker 4 (11:41):
Sometimes the past should be left to memory, to gather
dust within the covers of recorded time.

Speaker 5 (11:53):
In one hundred years, I'll have my revenge on your
great granddaughter.

Speaker 4 (11:58):
One of the funds the secret of the South Sea
Queen will live in great danger of a song.

Speaker 3 (12:04):
Oh yes I will. But how is she to know?

Speaker 4 (12:09):
Meet Tadya, an American anthropologist who travels to Indonesia.

Speaker 3 (12:13):
In search of truth.

Speaker 4 (12:16):
What she finds is that the legend of the South
Sea Queen is more than a story. It is her fate,
a tale of possession, revenge, insatiable desire, and an evil
that will not die.

Speaker 5 (12:36):
Thank you, Erica. That woman cannot die.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
All right now, If you want to watch Lady Termine,
you can catch a stream here there. But the best
way to see this one, as of this writing, is
on the DVD from Mondo Micabro. We've talked about Mondo
Micabro releases before they put out a lot of great films.
I rented it here from Atlanta's own video Drum, which
has a nice little selection of Indonesian horror films.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
I've got that disc. There is also a stream on
archive dot Org. I was checking out part of But
it's nice to have the packaging because then you get
to see the extremely classy tagline for the film, which
is first she mates, then she terminates.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
It rhymes, So I can't really argue with it, though
one does wonder how much mating she's actually doing in
this picture.

Speaker 3 (13:43):
Yeah, I guess somewhat less than expected. That's sort of
front loaded in the first half of the movie, but
there's plenty of terminating, I guess.

Speaker 2 (13:51):
Yeah, she's generally happy to skip the first part and
just get to the extermination.

Speaker 3 (13:55):
Mostly she terminates.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
Yeah, all right, Well, let's jump into the behind this film,
though I do have to stress that this is one
of those cases where there's not a lot of information
about everyone involved, and in some cases maybe I just
wasn't privy to that information or wasn't able to find it.
But let's start at the top with the director credited
as Jaliel Jackson. It is h Chehut Jaliel, who lived

(14:19):
nineteen thirty two through I Believe twenty fourteen. His death
date isn't listed on IMDb, but I've seen his death
date listed elsewhere. Indonesian director Active from I Believe nineteen
seventy four through nineteen ninety four. Director of numerous cult
favorite films, including nineteen eighty one's Mystics in Bali, a
horror movie full of Indonesian folkloric elements, including the penanglan

(14:42):
floating heads with entrails, which if you haven't some of
you may be familiar with it from seeing Mystics in Bali,
but they're often given us fair amount of attention in
various monster books and folklore treatments and so forth.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Oh, I just had to google it. Yeah, I think
I've seen screenshots from this before where it's like it
looks like a doll's head floating and then just some
stuff dangling out of the neck.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, this is one of the big ones that I
haven't seen it yet. This is this is my first
foray into in Indonesian horror, so I'll have to get
to that one. His other films include nineteen eighty one's
The Warrior in the Ninja starring Barry Prima, eighty six
is Satan's Bed, nineteen eighty eight White Crocodile Queens starring Susannah,
and nineteen ninety two's Dangerous Seductress. This was apparently his

(15:29):
biggest budgeted film up to that point, and I've read
that it did great business domestically before it was banned subsequently,
and I think there are different stories too about like
how did it get banned and somebody like essentially stab
it in the back? Was it importers of Western films
that were upset that this film was outperforming various international

(15:50):
pictures in Indonesia at the time. I'm not sure where
the truth lies in any of that, but of course
it would go on to earn its cult status internationally
as an import, and I mean it's been screened ultimately internationally.
So that's another point about watching this film. It's very
possible you might catch a rare screening of it on
the big screen.

Speaker 3 (16:09):
Here there. I'm trying to imagine what so like American
distributors are, like, nobody's going to the theaters to see Cocktail.
They're just buying more more tickets to see the Lady
Terminator again. We've got to do something about this. Yeah,
I don't know, but what else came out in the
eighty eight Three Men and a Baby.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
It looks like, yeah, this is yeah, this is nothing
on the same level as Lady Terminator, all right. The
credited writer here is one car Kruleinos. This is his
only credit on any of the movie databases that I
was able to look the film up on. He also
has a camera credit on this picture. I don't so
this is one of those where I have to flag

(16:48):
is this a real person?

Speaker 3 (16:51):
Is this is?

Speaker 2 (16:52):
I have no idea. Evidently someone did write it. There
was a script.

Speaker 3 (16:56):
Yeah, And while we should mention I guess that if
we haven't already said this. The dialogue in the film
is dubbed. In all of it is dubbed, but it
does usually match what the character's mouths are saying when
they're moving, so it's not live sound. But it does
appear that the dialogue is mostly as written and performed

(17:17):
by the actors in the scene, though there are some
very funny moments of what feel like lines subbed in later,
like especially lines directly from Terminator. They just kind of
get come in from somebody speaking off screen.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Yeah, Like there's one part we'll probably go back to
where you get the feeling where they that they were like,
oh we didn't we forgot to put in come with
me if you want to live, and so they just
kind of throw it in after an explosion, Come.

Speaker 3 (17:39):
With me, if you want to live. Yeah, it happens past.
I don't do we see the guy's mouth. I don't remember. Yeah,
we don't.

Speaker 2 (17:55):
All right, let's talk about the cast here. Oh, the star.
The title character, Lady Terminator, or before she becomes Lady
Terminator Tanya, is played by Barbara Ann Constable.

Speaker 3 (18:05):
This is a classic case of don't you hate when
you go scuba diving in order to complete research for
your anthropology PhD and you get turned into a terminator?

Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah, go scuba diving by yourself. My wife was quick
to point out, Oh, she has no buddy. This is
you always go scuba diving with a buddy, even if
you're checking out mysterious ruins on these on the seafloor.

Speaker 3 (18:28):
So who's Barbara Ann Constable here? All right?

Speaker 2 (18:30):
She well, she's one of a kind. Australian dancer, turn model,
turn actress. This is her only credited film role on
any of the databases as far as I could tell,
though I've seen a couple of interviews with her print
interviews where she says that prior to this she shot
some sort of Chinese film in Shanghai. I think she
said it had ballet in it, but she didn't know

(18:52):
what the name of it was, and I don't know
that anyone has ever been able to track it down.
So there may be another film out there in which
she appears to some degree, But for the most part,
it's one and done, like this is her picture, and
I mean credit where credits do. I think she does
a great job here, at least once she's the Terminator.
I mean, she's less believable as a human lady, but

(19:13):
once she is Lady Terminator, I absolutely buy into it.

Speaker 3 (19:18):
She was watching Terminator and taking notes like she's got
the physicality down. She does the kind of like three
point turn with her body really good when she's going
around corners and the police station. The scenes are so
many scenes of her running around chasing the Erica or heroine,
and just like kicking down doors in the police station.

(19:39):
The kicking motion it really sticks with me.

Speaker 2 (19:41):
Oh yeah, yeah, I think she's tremendous here. I totally
buy into everything she's doing on the screen. So, based
on a couple of interviews, I was able to run
down her casting came out of some international modeling work
that she was doing while traveling around Asia, and she
agreed to this picture assuming that it would be a
purely domestic film and not something that would ultimately screen

(20:02):
anywhere else in the world. But yeah, as far as
amazing one and done B movie performances, I think she
might top the list. I can't think of anybody else
like this who just comes out of nowhere and then
also and then subsequently vanishes that excels to this degree.
Like the closest I could think of is Warhawk Tanzania
in Devil's Express But even he had like one other

(20:25):
part in a film I think prior to that.

Speaker 3 (20:28):
Oh okay, but I agree. I mean, if you see
Lady Terminator, you are not going to forget Barbara Ann
Constable's perfore she's going to be in your brain.

Speaker 2 (20:35):
Yeah yeah, I mean she has all the screen time
in the world here, and you just have to imagine
an alternate universe where she followed this up either with
other Indonesian films or perhaps internationally, like maybe ended up
doing some films in Australia.

Speaker 3 (20:52):
Or Lady Terminator too term Harder.

Speaker 2 (20:54):
Yeah, I mean, I'm down for that or some other
film where she essentially plays the Lady Terminator. It just
seems like, especially for someone who didn't have a martial
arts background, she's so good in the action here. She's
totally believable, Like apparently she had weapons training prior to filming,
which shows because she's firing a machine gun all the

(21:15):
time in this picture, and at least to my untrained eyes,
like it's believable, and she's doing it with her eyes
wide open, which I understand takes a little bit of
effort to get that trick down as well. All right,
let's move into the rest of the cast. I get
we'll have more to say about this terrific performance as
if we move on. But I guess our hero of

(21:36):
the picture.

Speaker 3 (21:37):
Is our Rev Brown for the Evening.

Speaker 2 (21:39):
Yes, our Rev Brown is Max, played by Christopher J. Hart.
This is his only film role, I believe. Constable describes
him as an expat working in Jakarta at the time,
possibly an engineer. I don't know that she knew or remembered.
I tried to find out any additional information on this guy.
I did find an Atlanta area surge with the same name,

(22:00):
and I really wanted it to be the same guy.
But I have to admit to myself that I think
these are two different people.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
Yeah, just a coincidence. Well, this guy has real blast
hard cheese energy. As I said, he's very red, brown,
square jawed, hunky guy with blonde hair who's just a
slab of meat there to be our hero. And he's
got a real I don't know his delivery. There's one

(22:27):
moment that I think we were talking about off Mike.
I didn't already say this on the episode, did I about?
There's one moment that I think kind of sums up
his performance. Though this is attributable to the writing as well.
So it's copying lots of scenes from Terminator. And you
remember the scene from Terminator where Kyle Reese, the soldier
from the future who has come back in time to

(22:48):
protect Sarah Connor. He's been shot and she's helping him
and she's like, she's like, your bullet wound, doesn't it hurt?
And he says in Terminator pain can be controlled, you
just disconnect it. In this movie, it recreates that scene
and he's got a bullet wound and she, the Erica character,
is like, doesn't it hurt? And he's like nah, And

(23:11):
that's that's Max here.

Speaker 2 (23:13):
So Erica is the heroine, I guess, or at least
the damsel in distress. Well, the Sarah Connor role, the
Sarah Connor role, except what if Sarah Connor like wasn't
also like pretty tough and self gone. I don't know.
I mean, I don't want to take anything away from Erica.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
But I look, Erica, she make her a singer in
this movie. It's true she is.

Speaker 2 (23:32):
She's a singer. She has presumably a good voice. I
don't know we actually hear that voice, but I believe
through the magic of cinema that she has one.

Speaker 3 (23:39):
I feel like this is another leveling up choice they made.
So they wanted to recreate the tech noir club sequence
from Terminator, but they but they were like, what if
instead the Sarah Connor character was not just waiting in
tech Noir for the police to arrive and help her,
but she was actually singing on stage and giving a performance.
I'm like that's good. Okay, that is a level up.

Speaker 2 (24:01):
Yeah, Yeah, that's a great secrets. I look forward to
talking about that one. It's like a like a disco
teche number, a full musical number ahead of the rampage.

Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, a tech noir club with the guy who looks
like Geddy Lee and a cowboy hat and sunglasses tending bar.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Yes, and Erica is played here by Claudia Angelique Rotamaker,
again her only film croll A role here, so I
don't know anything else about her, but she does a
perfectly fine job here. All right, Now, there is a
There is a group of gentlemen that help Max out.
Some of them are total red shirts, but at least
three of them, maybe more. There are guys with mustaches

(24:39):
like they are white dudes with with mustaches that get
I get confused with in this picture, I'm not sure
if we're dealing with one mustachioed Caucasian guy or multiple
mustachio Caucasian guys.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
Yeah, there's one beef guy who's essentially a copy of Max,
but change it to brown hair and add the mustache,
so he's the muscle guy. And then you've got should
we can we talk about snake for a minute. Snake's
my favorite character in the film.

Speaker 2 (25:07):
Snake is terrific. So out of these so out of
these gentlemen. It's like Max has essentially three buddies, white
dude with a mustache and two Indonesian gentlemen. One one
is serious and one is the obvious ham of the bunch.
And that's that's Snake. Strong stoner vibes for Snake.

Speaker 3 (25:23):
Wait, am I thinking of the right guy? Snake is
the guy with the blonde mullet wig. Yes, okay, okay.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yes, that is Snake played by Adam Stardust.

Speaker 3 (25:33):
That's a real name.

Speaker 2 (25:34):
No, no, and I and this may not be his
you know, birth name either, but yeah. He's also known
as Adam Juguani. And while this is Adam stardust slash,
Adam Juguani's only film role on the major film Databasis,
he is seemingly still around and is a DJ with
an easy to find social media footprint in I Believe

(25:55):
in Indonesia. He is quote existing at sixty living in
the eighties. Some more power to him. You can look
him up on YouTube. He's got mixes at parties. This
dude is still still out there partying hard when.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
He gets blasted by the laser beams from Lady Terminator's eyes.
I gasped, I made a noise. It was a terrible loss.

Speaker 2 (26:14):
You don't really expect the comic relief character to just
get eye blasted, and generally they get to survive.

Speaker 3 (26:20):
Not Snake. They couldn't do that to Snake, all.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
Right, the mustachioed guy. And I may be wrong. There
are different parts in the dub where I feel like
certain characters could refer to by a confusingly different name.

Speaker 3 (26:33):
Tom, and which one was Tom?

Speaker 2 (26:36):
Tom?

Speaker 3 (26:36):
Okay, so Tom the best friend.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Tom is the best friend. But there's a point where
somebody blows up in a helicopter and they also call
that guy Tom.

Speaker 3 (26:45):
That's what I thought I heard, too, Okay, but that
wasn't the same guy.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
Right, Tom on the ground, Tom a best friend. Tom
is played by e King Fozzy born nineteen fifty nine,
Indonesian rock star of the nineteen eighties. You can look
him up on discogs multiple releases as an actor active
through at least twenty twenty three. And I certainly don't
know much about Indonesian cinema outside of some of these

(27:10):
exploitation pictures, but it seems like his roles outside of
the late nineteen eighties were actually supporting roles in more
serious films, more like mainstream fair.

Speaker 3 (27:20):
Okay, well, I'm glad he got to play around and
stuff like this though, because he's fun too. He is
this the guy who when they're like escaping the police station,
he gets shot and you think he's dead, and then
he comes back later and they're like, oh, you're alive,
and he's like, yeah, I am, that's right.

Speaker 2 (27:37):
Yeah, and then spoilers, but he also gets shot again
and you think he's dead, like this time for real,
but then he seems to survive and then possibly die again.
We're not sure, all right. And then finally white guy
with the mustache, or at least the main one, the
one that factors into the final battle, is played by
Joseph P McGlenn. I think this character's name is Joe,

(27:59):
but he might also be referred to as Tank. I
could be wrong. As far as I could tell, he
was a helicopter pilot working in Indonesia at the time.
This is his only film credit. I may or may
not have found his LinkedIn profile.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
You gonna hire him?

Speaker 2 (28:14):
No, I think he's retired. But oh, okay, but if
I need somebody to go up against a killer female robot,
you know I'm gonna sign up for LinkedIn Pro and
contact him.

Speaker 3 (28:24):
I guess, okay, Now what about our mage class character? Yes,
don't we also in the party have a wise old wizard.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, our van helson of the group who consults grand
uncle Masabu played by an actor credited as h I M.
Damshik who lived nineteen twenty nine through twenty twelve, very
slender Indonesian actor with credits seemingly strewn across numerous tantalizing

(28:53):
genre films. He'd apparently been a dancer and then dance
instructor and choreographer, working like adjacent to film and then
maybe in film a little bit before they started casting
him in parts. And based on like the pictures he's
showing up in and some of the names of the characters,
I can easily imagine that this guy became a go
to elder actor for various supporting elder characters. You know,

(29:17):
you need a Van Helsing type role. You need a
I don't know, you know, a wise old mage like
you like you say, this is the guy you cast.

Speaker 3 (29:24):
That's right, he's got a very wispy beard, and he
he you know, tells the tale of the of the
curse from ancient from the ancient past. Though he's not
just somebody with intellectual book learning about the magic, he
has a personal connection to it because he's sort of
the guardian of our heroin. He's there to deliver the
lore to her and to pass along the magical artifact

(29:45):
that she's going to need in order to defeat the
Lady Terminator and undo the south Sea Queen's magic. That's right.

Speaker 2 (29:52):
This actor's other credits include nineteen eighty Satan Slave, nineteen
eighty one's The Warrior, as well as Queen of Black Magic.
That one has Susannah eighty two is The Snake Queen,
also starring Susannah eighty four is The Devil's Sword nineteen
ninety and also nineteen ninety two's Lady Dragon that had
Cynthia Rothrock in it, and then many other pictures as well.

Speaker 3 (30:12):
Also, this is a more serious character, but he gets
a really ignominious end.

Speaker 2 (30:17):
Yes, he doesn't really get a very dignified death, does he.
But it's an hilarious death.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
We'll have to talk more about that. Yeah, all right.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
The only other acting credit of note, The Queen of
the South Sea, as we encounter her at the very
beginning of the picture, is played by an actress credited
by the name Fortinella, popular Indonesian actress of apparently mixed
Indonesian and Italian descent who acted in a string of films,
mostly in the nineteen nineties and mostly comedies. Finally, the music, Oh,

(30:49):
I love the music of Lady Terminator. I do not
know exactly what its origins are. It's credited to one
Ricky Brothers and they have no other credits, so I
don't know this is somebody's pseudonym. If this is like
a pair of composed is.

Speaker 3 (31:04):
It Ricky Brothers or the Ricky Brothers.

Speaker 2 (31:08):
I took it to be someone named Ricky Brothers, like
that's their stage name or something. But there are no
other credits, and as far as I can tell, like
this is all original music, you know it's there are
obviously some terminator notes in there. Yes, there are a
few times where I got kind of like a slight
biosphere vibe off of it before it got terminatory again.

(31:31):
But I really enjoyed it. It strikes the exact note
you want for a picture like Lady Terminator.

Speaker 3 (31:45):
Okay, you ready to talk about the plot.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Let's discuss the plot.

Speaker 3 (31:49):
All right. So I've been a bit under the weather
this week, so Rob, I had to lean on you
to make more plot notes. This time. I'm gonna have
to rely on you to get us through the plot here.
But I did make some notes about the very beginning here.

Speaker 2 (31:59):
I did watch this the first time when I had
a fever, okay, to make sure we're kind of lining
up with being under the weather whilst watching Lady Terminator.

Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yes, okay, okay. So we opened the film on a
bleak picture of these waves rolling along in a very
cold looking kind of gray green sea, and there's a
sound of wind whipping all around, and then a voiceover
comes in from out of nowhere, and it says it's
a very i should say, very sharp vocal delivery. It's

(32:28):
a very almost kind of venomous tone in delivering this
dialogue or not dialogue, and voiceover it says, sometimes the
past should be left to memory to gather dust within
the cupboards of recorded time. That's it, that's what it says.
Now we cut to waves crashing against a rocky shore,

(32:52):
and there's a castle perched up on a seaside cliff,
and there's very dreamy eighties music. There's kind of some
glass bell synthesizer and reverbi drums, you know that eighties sound.
It's like, you know, drums in an empty steel haul. Yeah,
I love it.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
And this castle looks really cool. I get kind of
a Indonesian Gothic vibe from this castle. Presumably this is
the castle of the south Sea Queen or the woman
who is going to become the south Sea Queen in
this prologue.

Speaker 3 (33:20):
Right, So the strings come in on the soundtrack and
we get the classic the ds A motif D and
we see a lady here. She's in a bedroom, kind
of misty bedroom. There's like a fog billowing around, and
we see you know, bed sheets kind of hanging down
or I don't know what you call those bed curtains
hanging down all around. I watched part of this with Rachel,

(33:41):
and she pointed out, when you see the bed at
this part, it looks almost like it's like a table,
looks like not cushiony, like very flat and hard with
just like a sheet over it, but some kind of
flat surface. And this lady is on a bed having
sex with a man. She's wearing a sheer green dress
or wrap of some kind, with a bunch of gold
jewelry around her neck and in her hair with heavy

(34:02):
blue eyeshadow. And I guess this is our south Sea Queen,
that's right.

Speaker 2 (34:05):
And we quickly see that her green dress is for
some sort of sarong that wraps around her body and
then trails on the floor, almost like the tail of
a great snake or perhaps a mermaid. Yeah, and so
in this prologue here we get a version of the
south Sea Queen myth. At first, it seems like this
prologue is set in historic mythic times, but we're later

(34:27):
going to learn that this is probably like eighteen eighty nine,
because there's one hundred years prior to the picture.

Speaker 3 (34:33):
I guess it would have to be yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:34):
Yeah, eighteen eighty eight, eighteen eighty nine, something like that. Okay,
So the south Sea Queen as depicted here, seems to
have an insatiable appetite for sex and death, inviting eager
men into her castle where she loves them up, and
then she kills them via some form of implied vagina
dentata attack. So surely she's on top of them, there

(34:57):
are some everyone pulls some weird faces, and then there's
a splur of blood across everyone's bodies and they're done.
The lover is dead.

Speaker 3 (35:05):
Yeah. We get the scene many times in the movie
of a guy who's like really excited, he's like, oh boy,
and then we just get the like the splurt of
blood coming up his torso into his face.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yes, punished for his lust. And so in this sequence,
she dispenses with yet another victim and then wonders aloud
as she eats some grapes if anyone, if any lover
out there can possibly satisfire. And that's when a handsome,
heroic man boldly strolls in and seems to take her
up on the challenge, and in the midst of their
love making, he grabs a serpent from her, like from

(35:38):
around her thighs, which in turn transforms into a Chris
that's a Javanese traditional asymmetrical dagger.

Speaker 3 (35:47):
Oh okay, I was curious about that word. I was
hearing it throughout the movie. But yeah, it's sort of
like a wavy looking kind of dagger. Yeah. Yeah, So
the eel snake thing turns into the knife.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
That's right, right, So he's and you know, you quickly
get the idea that he has. He has, you know,
stopped her from killing him with her magic, but he's
also kind of captured some of her magic. Whatever the
details of it. She's outraged, and he's like, calm down,
we're married now and the killings need to stop.

Speaker 3 (36:19):
But she doesn't like this. She doesn't like having her
deadly eel power stolen. So she curses him.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Right, she says, one hundred years from now, I'm going
to come back and kill your great granddaughter, and then
she wanders out into the sea to join the evil
forces of the deep. And then we'll later learn that
that castle apparently follows her into the depths, sinking beneath
the waves.

Speaker 3 (36:39):
By the way, when she swears revenge, Rob, you were
not really like shortening or summarizing at all. That's exactly
she just says, in one hundred years, I'll have my
revenge on your great granddaughter.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
Yes, yeah, no additional additional details. And we don't even
know how he really responds to it. I guess he's
kind of shocked, but he's like, well, okay, fair, but no,
I guess he's probably distressed because he thought they had
a shot at actually making this marriage work, and it
very quickly fell apart. So we get our title, we

(37:10):
get our opening credits, and then we fast forward to
present day and we meet our protagonists for now, the
young American anthropologist Tanya, whose research concerns the South Sea Queen.

Speaker 3 (37:22):
So she is in Indonesia, from what I understand, trying
to complete her PhD. But it's funny because she talks
about it more like a I don't know, like a
high school student having to complete an assignment. She's like,
I've got to finish writing this thesis or I won't graduate.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
Yeah, I can't go to prom. I can't go to
the PhD prom if I don't get this done.

Speaker 3 (37:44):
But yeah, So she's there studying the south Sea Queen,
but also doesn't seem to be all that knowledgeable about it,
like she's kind of getting there and finding out things
about Yeah, like because it what's the deal with the
south Sea Queen? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, this again, this is constable. This is the less
convincing half of her performance before she becomes Lady Terminator.
Right now, she's just Lady Anthropologist, And so she's on
the hunt for details about the South Sea Queen. We
get a creepy research sequence in what I can only
assume is a very hot attic library. That's the main

(38:21):
vibe I got off of it. But she's asking around
about forbidden books and quickly acquiring forbidden books and learning
about the south Sea Queen.

Speaker 3 (38:29):
She also meets our wizard character.

Speaker 2 (38:31):
That's right, that's right, and he's like, you you shouldn't,
you shouldn't dove into such things. And she's like, oh,
but I want to, and he's like, okay, yeah. And
so now that we have the library sequence done, we
move on to actual field work, a solo scuba expedition
to the castle of the South Sea Queen on the
bottom of the ocean on a chartered boat that features

(38:52):
a grumpy captain as well as some guy named Popeye.

Speaker 3 (38:55):
Kind of an Indonesian quint character is the captain here.
There's some Robert Shawl energy coming off of him, like
he's drinking a beer out of a can and he's
he's arguing with her. He's kind of gruff, you know,
He's like, you shouldn't go there to the I think
first he dismisses her interest in the South Sea Queen
is like, oh, that's a bunch of nonsense, and then
he starts getting real. He's like, look, you don't want

(39:17):
to do this, you don't want to mess around. But
somehow I forget how she convinces him.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah, I mean she she chooses logic.

Speaker 3 (39:23):
First.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
She's like, we're living in the modern age. She cites
people are building space stations on the moon, you know, yeah,
and he's like, that's right, they are totally doing that,
and therefore my superstitious beliefs feel a little embarrassing.

Speaker 3 (39:38):
Yeah, so we're safe from the South Sea Queen.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
And then she kind of charms him a little bit
and he's like, okay, we'll take you there again a
solo scuba trip. So she goes in. We get a
little stock footage of some very murky looking corals. She
comes back up at first because of something in her
unit's not working right. Then she goes down again, and
then we get this great sequence where the water becomes

(40:02):
disturbed and the captain like looks, he looks down, then
he looks up and then he's like, oh.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
God, what have I done?

Speaker 2 (40:08):
And then he's destroyed by a wave. Yes, I regret nothing.

Speaker 3 (40:13):
But Tanya is still down there. So she's descending to
the sunken castle of the south Sea Queen.

Speaker 2 (40:18):
And something goes south down there, because the next thing
we see, she is in her black bikini strapped to
the south Sea Queen's massive like hard platform bed that
we saw in the prologue, and a supernatural snake or
eel or something crawls up to her nethers and obviously
possesses her either with the spirit of the South Sea

(40:40):
Queen or as we have been discussing, at least the
strong influence of the South Sea Queen.

Speaker 3 (40:45):
Right, And so from now on she's just in terminator mode.
And it's not one of those movies where somebody is
snapping back to reality and becoming themselves again and they're like,
what is taking over me? I don't understand this. It's
not a werewolf type struggle. She's just a terminator from
now on.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yeah, Tanya, the lady anthropologist that you may be so
invested in at this point and the picture is gone.
You'll never see her again. Now she is a vessel
of pure vengeance. So from here we cut to her emergence.
He emerges a half naked on a midnight shore terminator style,
bolts of animated blue lightning coming off of her body.

Speaker 3 (41:21):
She comes up on the shore, and much like in Terminator,
she first comes across a group of a hard drinking
punks out you know, for a night out on the town.
They're drinking out of brown bags, I guess. And except
these guys I think are having significantly more fun even
than the group of punks including Bill Paxton at the
beginning of Terminator, you know what I mean, Like, they

(41:43):
will not stop laughing, and one guy is just he
is so just goofully laughing it up that he can't
stop urinating in a like a stream that's just blasting
off of him while he's talking to his buddy. It's
it's hard to describe the energy of this scene.

Speaker 2 (42:01):
Yes, he basically screams, Oh God, I need a woman
as he falls to his knees, beer in one hand,
cigarette in the other, peeing into the air. These are
the dirt bags that are about to get murdered by
Lady Terminator. And that's that's basically how it goes down.
She wanders up Terminator style, still half naked, but now
with a green necklace like a jade necklace that's going

(42:23):
to be important here in a bit. She approaches these
guys and they immediately offer her pot in good times
in their car, and basically she makes very short work
of them death by snooz snow, and she takes their clothes,
their boots, but she leaves their motor car behind.

Speaker 3 (42:39):
It exactly, and it's the kind of death we saw
earlier where the guys like mid coitus and then suddenly
like spray of blood up the stomach into the face.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
He's like, ooh, now for there. It's off to one
of the many hotels that serve as locations for this film.
A lot of this film seems to have been filmed
in very nice looking hotels and all so airport runways
and also some malls, some nice shopping malls. So seemingly
our lady Terminator has checked into the penthouse at this

(43:08):
nice hotel and we get this. It's kind of, I guess,
a meditation scene or communing with the spirit of the
south Sea Queen. It's pretty cool. They're gels. There's like,
I guess the MTV is playing on the TV. There's
an enormous penthouse bar and she's like meditating topless before
a portrait of the south Sea Queen that's on the wall.

Speaker 3 (43:29):
Why do they have that?

Speaker 2 (43:30):
I don't Yeah, I don't know if it was this
there or it magically appeared. We get more of this
time travel Terminator Highlander, the quickening lightning, and this ends
up exploding liquor bottles, destroying lamps, lights up her eyes
and nipples. And then the security guard shows up with
an oozy and just gets immediately taken out. She just

(43:51):
like yanks him by the collar and you know he's
done for.

Speaker 3 (43:53):
So something I noticed is the Lady Terminator is on
a mission. She has a main target that she's going after,
and we will find find out it is the singer Erica,
who I think we see on the TV.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
In this is that Erica? That would make sense, I think.

Speaker 3 (44:06):
So she's singing on the TV.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
So this is not merely meditation. This is research. She's like, Yeah,
she's seeking out Erica and then powering up so that
she can go out and get her hook.

Speaker 3 (44:15):
Ah. That's the great granddaughter I'm supposed to get revenge on.
So there there is that target. But I would say functionally,
what she really hates in this movie is glass and crotches. Yes,
those are the main things she attacks.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
Yes, she is going to shatter some glass, and she's
going to shatter some crotches. So much crotch violence in
this picture. We have some great examples to share.

Speaker 3 (44:39):
You could just tell the director was never getting tired
of it.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
Yeah, all right, So from here we cut to this location,
just screams expat bar. I don't know, I don't know where.
I couldn't find it. I looked for more information about
filming local, even where in Indonesia everything was shot, and
I didn't get a lot. So, uh, this is I think,

(45:06):
supposed to be New York City, but it's some sort
of a restaurant bar environment that has a bunch of
Union jacks up.

Speaker 3 (45:13):
Wait, then this is supposed to be New York City.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
I there was some detail in this dialogue that made
me think it, what like, this is not supposed to
be Indonesia, right, this is supposed to be Max. This
is supposed to be Max's home country.

Speaker 3 (45:27):
Well, I had a lot of questions about where this
was supposed to take place. Nothing really made sense, but
I thought it was definitely not supposed to be anywhere
in the United States because at one point he calls
his friends in the United States. He says, I'm putting
in a call to my friends in the States, and
he calls them and they answer and they come over.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
Is this in the bar scene or is this in
a later scene?

Speaker 3 (45:49):
Maybe in a later scene.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
Okay, my read on this, this is a flashback. We
don't know it's a flashback yet, but where you'll find
out that it's a flashback. I think this is Max
in his former life, maybe in New York, maybe in Australia,
who knows. But then we get some hint of a
tragedy that forces him to then join the Indonesian police force.

Speaker 3 (46:13):
Okay, I think I'm confused about what Yes, you were
right to probably.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
Confused by this. But in this sequence, in this bar,
we meet Max along with I think Snake and Tom
are there, so that the Snake's presence does lead us
to wonder if this is maybe actually Indonesia. I don't know,
But basically what happens is there's a pretty lady in
the bar. A couple of abusive eighties movie punks show

(46:38):
up and they start harassing her, and so Snake and
Tom and Max they bump, they bust him up, they
drive them away, and then we almost immediately cut away
from Max talking to this lady to him pining tragically
over a photograph of himself and said, lady, and apparently
now he is a homicide detective in perhaps Jakarta.

Speaker 3 (47:00):
Okay, that's all making sense now. I was having fragmented
memories I was trying to piece together. Yes, you're right.
So so, yeah, we see the flashback of him meeting
his wife, and then immediately we cut to somethings terrible
has happened. She's gone now, and he's he's in Indonesia
as a police officer for some reason.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
Yeah, it doesn't make sense, but this is what we
have to work with. Yes, And they're almost immediately called
out on a job. We get this, we get this
hilarious hot dog conversation where we get the line we've
seen more dead bodies and you've eaten hot dogs, so
shut up and eat.

Speaker 3 (47:32):
I'm saying that all the time.

Speaker 2 (47:34):
So they're called out clearly to investigate some of these
south Sea Queen killings. They don't know it's the south
Sea Queen yet, but there are some murders happening and
Max and his team are on the case.

Speaker 3 (47:45):
Is this the part where they go to the morgue
to see the bodies and they're like, huh, the genitals
were removed from all these men, and one of them
is like, could be a small animal.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
That comes later, but this is' that's like phase two
of their work. Yeah, okay, but before where we get that,
we end up having to touch base with Erica, who
we've I guess seen on the screen. We've talked about
her already, but this is who will learn to be
the curse great granddaughter of the Casanova from the opening prologue,
the woman that the terminator, the lady terminator here is

(48:15):
out to murder.

Speaker 3 (48:16):
So she's a popular music sensation and I think when
we first meet her, she's being interviewed by like somebody
comes up with a news camera microphone.

Speaker 2 (48:24):
For yeah, and what is clearly a very nice hotel lobby,
but they're like, hey, this is Joe Peterson for Channel six.
Tell us about how famous you are and can't you
can you not wait to be famous?

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Like it's weird.

Speaker 2 (48:35):
They're interviewing her like she's a celebrity, but also asking
her us like what do you think is going to
be like when you're famous? And she's like, I can't imagine, well,
she's still she's still very much an everyday you know
girl who wants to go to the mall, and she
does that. In the next scene with her friend Lydia,
they're trying on jewelry and there they particularly they go
to a jewelry store and Erica is already wearing an

(48:59):
authentic jade necks that is identical to the one that
Lady Terminator was wearing earlier. And just to confuse things
even more, Lydia says, I'm going to buy an exact
replica of your authentic jade necklace that you got from
your ancestor. And everyone's like, this sounds like a good plan. Meanwhile,
of course, Lady Terminator has already shown up at the

(49:20):
mall and is stalking them.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
You don't actually get these sound effects, but as she's
walking through the mall, you can just hear in your
head like the.

Speaker 2 (49:30):
And Lady t is decked out in what will be
her signature look for most of the picture, at least
when she's not naked, she's wearing a green sportspra. She's
got black leather jacket on and then these like tight
stitched like open at the sides leather rocker pants like
eighties heavy not heavy metal, but eighties metal pants. Yes,
but she didn't have the green necklace anymore. Now her

(49:50):
necklace is black. For whatever reason, didn't notice that change.
I should also point out that Lady Terminator has great hair.
She has this like great zoos will ask head of
Sigourney Weaver hair going on in most of the picture.
And yeah, there's no denying Constables a stone cold knockout
in this end. Evidently by virtue of the weapons training

(50:12):
she's received, ultimately pretty convincing firing all these guns, which
she's about to do.

Speaker 3 (50:18):
Right, because Erica and her friend they part ways, right,
Eric has to go do something else and her friend
goes into the bathroom, and for some reason, Lady Terminator
goes after her first.

Speaker 2 (50:29):
Right, goes into the bathroom, shoots her with an UZI,
kills an innocent bystander, and then she pulls the necklace
off of her and quickly discerns that it's a fake.
So the hunt continues. More stalking in the mall, more
senseless murder of humans, and television.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
Sets had to break some glass, that's right.

Speaker 2 (50:45):
Meanwhile, cut to the seaside and we see Grand uncle Masabu,
and he is meditating and clearly has a premonition that
Erica is in trouble, and he draws the sacred Chris
Knife knife and he realizes he needs to jump in
there and help. Then we get the autopsy scene that
we already describe.

Speaker 3 (51:04):
Okay, so it was not a small animal as they
first suspect, But then they make some crude jokes, and
then also there is a there's some comic relief in
the scene because the autop like the morgue attendant is
just eating spicy noodles.

Speaker 2 (51:17):
Yeah, he's just they're eating noodles. They're like, you're disgusting,
and he's like, I gotta eat. And from there we
cut to the disco sequence that we referenced earlier. They
later clarified that this is the Manhattan Club.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
The Manhattan Club is the tech noir of Lady Terminy.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
That's right, and this before anything even really happens in
this scene. It's splendid. It's just great disco vibes. I
like the way it's shot. I love the colors. We
hear most of, if not the entire song that Eric
is performing. I wasn't able to hunt down what this
song is or who recorded it where it came from?

Speaker 3 (51:50):
But I like original. It seems the chorus says something
like we.

Speaker 2 (51:56):
Fight, fight for life, we serve those in power.

Speaker 3 (52:04):
That was a little confused, But what is that really?
What it means.

Speaker 2 (52:09):
As all we assist those in power? I think it says, Well,
it's everyone's having a great time here. It turns out
that Max is here with one of his co workers,
one of the other detectives named Jack. I believe, but
we learned Max is living in the past. He's unable
to move on. He can't fall in love again after
whatever horrible things happened to his previous girlfriend.

Speaker 3 (52:31):
You know so many cop characters in movies, they're always
they're taking it too personal, right the case, the case
is weighing on them. Max is not taking the job
too personal. He's taken his own personal life to personal,
which is a refreshing change.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
Better work life balance hard hard to.

Speaker 3 (52:48):
Maybe yeah, or work grief balance yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:51):
Now, of course, this, this this party vibe is not
going to last. A lady t shows up, we get
another massive shootout of those bottles on the bar. Don't
stand a chance. Nope, she takes those out for sure,
so there's an exchange of gunfire. Everyone's running for it.
This is the scene where Max apparently blurts out, come
with me if you want to live.

Speaker 3 (53:12):
Yea.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
But after Jack saves the day by like getting some
rather impactful shotgun blasted on Lady t but then Lady
murders Jack and he's out of it.

Speaker 3 (53:22):
Yeah, I think does she like twists his head or something. Yeah,
so this is a pretty good chase. But this also
is one scene where they're going to great lengths to
copy exact shots from Terminator, like the sequence where the
Terminator gets knocked down and then you see his fingers
twitch and he starts to get back up. They do
the exact same thing there, so they're clearly copying a

(53:43):
lot of staging. I mentioned this earlier, but did you
notice the bartender in the tech noir bar here. He's
got long hair and sunglasses and a cowboy hat. He's
just great.

Speaker 2 (53:56):
I know, I wish he could have seen more of him.
So this obviously erupts into, like we're saying, another big
chase scene, more explosions, gunfire, a burning Lady Terminator on
the hood of their vehicle, everybody steals at least one car,
but eventually they make it. They make it away to

(54:16):
the point that they can start doing some computer research
and pull up like a little computer image of Tanya
and get a little more detail on what's going on.

Speaker 3 (54:25):
I'm impressed that they're able to get an image of
Tanya's face on what looks like just like a green
text command prompt.

Speaker 2 (54:34):
So at this point they've got some more research finished
and they start getting the adventuring party together. Max is
invited to a night out in the town with the boys,
and the boys instead are like, we're coming to help you.
I think this is Snake and one of the other guys.

Speaker 3 (54:48):
Yeah. This is when he puts a call into what
I took to be the States or are they coming internationally.

Speaker 2 (54:53):
Oh God, that doesn't make sense because that's that's a
long and definitely not direct flight.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
I can say from experience, Well, yeah, maybe I misunderstood that.
But he does call his friends. They're like, we'll be
there to help, and they will show up for a
great final action scene.

Speaker 2 (55:10):
And then this is also when grand Uncle Masabu shows
up to assist. He checks out Erica's ambulant and he's like, yep,
this is it. This is how she's tracking you. But
this is but also, you know, drive some this is
a sacred artifact, and so forth, he gives us a
little more of the lore. Max isn't buying it though,
He's like, this is nonsense. And then there's this light.

(55:34):
Almost immediately, Erica says this to excuse him. She says,
he hasn't been in our country very long.

Speaker 3 (55:39):
But this is also where we're going to get the
magic dagger, right.

Speaker 2 (55:42):
That's right. Grand Uncle Masabu passes on the Chris to Lydia,
but he says, don't worry. I am here to protect you.
And it's a good thing he's here to protect her,
because the next scene is Lady Terminator driving in through
the hotel slash police station security and just killing everyone inside.

Speaker 3 (56:01):
So this is another copy of a sequence in Terminator
where the Terminator comes to the police station where Sarah
Connor is being held and attacks the whole police station
looking for her. Lady Terminator does the same thing here,
and it begins with yeah, driving her car through the
front desk.

Speaker 2 (56:17):
And this is the point where I noted from here
on out it's almost continuous machine gun fire, like they're
not gonna let up. But at the same time, it
never really gets boring.

Speaker 3 (56:28):
Well because it maintains a level of absurdity. Like we
mentioned how much she hates glass, so she is going
to shatter every piece of glass she comes across, every bottle,
every window, all that. But she also hates crotches, and
so in this scene, for example, she like shoots one
guy like five hundred times, and then after that kicks
him in the crotch.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
That's right. She shoots him off of the rafters, he
falls down, she says, where is Erica, and then just
shoots him in the torso like two dozen times. Yeah,
and then one good kick in the ball is for
good measure. And she goes on to just stylishly gun
down the rest of the security detail one by one.
Some of them she you know, shoots in the back.
Others she very strategically shoots in the groin, multiple quality

(57:12):
groin kills in this.

Speaker 3 (57:14):
I think she's aiming for the groin when she can, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:17):
Because that's the South Sea Queen's way, you know, That's
that's part of her lustful, vengeful mo Yeah, she is
going to aim for the crotch whenever possible. I think
all in all, in this picture, she kills like sixty
two people. I didn't do the count myself, but I
found one of these websites that includes kill counts for
different characters and films like this, and I think it's

(57:39):
something like sixty two people. It is a lot, all right.
But you know who's going to put a stop to this.
Grand Uncle Masabu, who shows up now dressed all in white,
enters the fray and we get this amazing supernatural standoff
between a grand Uncle Masabu with the jade amulet and
Lady Terminator with her machine gun.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
And you think maybe he's got the power to stop her.
That would make sense.

Speaker 2 (58:02):
It seems like it's working at first, right, because she
sees this guy, what is she gonna do? She's gonna
shoot him, so she unloads on him with the machine gun,
but the bullets are not touching him. He's like, he's
totally matrixing this situation, and I guess the bullets are
just passing through him. And she seems a little perplexed,
a little worried, like, Okay, now this is a threat

(58:24):
I wasn't prepared for. And then it's grand Uncle Masabu's
move he uses some sort of some form of telekinesis
to make the jade amulet fly directly into her eye socket,
knocking her down, and she seems to be down for
the count. We're like, oh my goodness, I think he
did it. I think he pulled it off. She's not
gonna set up Michael Meyer's style and start killing people again.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
But unfortunately she does. Not only that, but she right.
I feel like the grand Uncle. He's a character of
dignity and you would have expected him to have a
more dignified death, but no, it's once again just obscene,
absurd violence.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
There's this great moment where, once she sets up, he
glances down at his own crotch and he's like, oh,
my crotch is not protected now, or he doesn't say that,
but that's implied. And then she indeed pulls the machine
gun out and just shoots him directly in the crotch
multiple times. He falls against the wall and is dead.

Speaker 3 (59:20):
I felt this one. I like the grand Uncle.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
So from this point on, we of course get more
machine gun violence. Max and Tom collect Erica and they
take off. Somehow they make it out with only Tom
suffering a single movie gun shot to the shoulder, you
know the movie. Since it's not going to slow him
down much. They drive off into the night, finally stopping
in the country when they experience engine problems. Though Tom's

(59:53):
not there anymore. I don't know where he went.

Speaker 3 (59:55):
I think they leave him behind when he gets shot.
I thought, oh, okay, not maybe they did, because he's
not there in the countryside. I thought they're surprised when
they see him alive again later.

Speaker 2 (01:00:05):
Okay, I think you're correct.

Speaker 3 (01:00:08):
But this is where we're going to get several scenes
again recreating scenes from Terminator. So the scene in Terminator
is when Reese and Sarah Connor takes shelter under a bridge.
They patch up their wounds, and they get some backstory.
They talk about some of the themes of the movie,
including fate and you know, whether or not the future
can be changed and that kind of thing, and also

(01:00:30):
you see their love beginning to blossom. This covers some
of the same territory. But this is also the scene
where we get the like does it hurt the bullet wound?

Speaker 5 (01:00:38):
NA.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
Of course, this guy is not from the future. He's
just a homicide detective. So there's nothing to talk about there,
but you do get some of his tragic backstory, telling
the story of how his wife was killed, and that's
you know, the source of his pain now. But I
don't know, for some reason, you haven't really seen any
good reason for them to be falling in love, but
they do. So Max and Erica they're like, okay lovers.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
Now, Yeah, they have a tender love scene in which
blood is not splurted anywhere and in which no snakes
or knives factor into the love making at all.

Speaker 3 (01:01:10):
Also, in what I thought was a pretty funny choice,
it it also takes shots directly from the sex scene
in Terminator.

Speaker 2 (01:01:21):
Well, speaking of ripping off Terminator shot for shot, Now
we go to the topless regeneration scene for Lady t.
It's the gels are in place again. This is back
in the I guess, the same hotel Penthouse from before.
The music here, I thought specifically sounded a little bit
like Biosphere with a little bit of with certainly those

(01:01:43):
Terminator vibes as well.

Speaker 3 (01:01:45):
Yes there's that. And and this is going to be
the scene from Terminator where his eye is damaged so
he has to take his fleshy eye out and reveal
the you know, the machine eye underneath.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
She's a great sequence in the original Terminator, one that
really stuck with me as a young viewer, and of
course one that makes total sense. The Terminator is a machine.
His eye is damage, his real eye beneath the flesh.
He has to make repairs, and therefore he has to
cut into his body is fleshy parts, remove the fleshy parts,

(01:02:16):
and repair the metal.

Speaker 3 (01:02:17):
Underneath, right, and so his eyes will be shielded by
dark sunglasses for the rest of the movie for that reason.
But the Lady Terminator, she's got to take her eye out,
and you know what I'm going to say. I was
fairly impressed by the makeup effects here. Yeah, they have
like a copy of her head that looked convincing enough.
She's like cutting into the eye with the scalpel. I
was like, ooh, how are they doing that for a

(01:02:39):
second before I realized, like, oh wait, that's not really her,
that's like a mannequin head. But it looks pretty good.

Speaker 2 (01:02:43):
Yeah, yeah, the effects were good. It's rippon off Terminator,
but doing it somewhat effectively, I don't know that it
made any sense, because again, she's not a machine. There's
no reason for her to take her eyeball out, and
yet she removes her eyeball seems to wash it off,
and then there's some highlander quickening sparks off of it,

(01:03:03):
and then she just sticks it back in and it's like, oh,
all fixed up and ready for more sex and death.

Speaker 3 (01:03:08):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:10):
But before that happens, there's a we get some more
strong zool vibes because a bus boy shows up with breakfast,
and of course he gets sex murder.

Speaker 3 (01:03:18):
He does not take any convincing. He shows up with
the breakfast and she's like hey, and she does the
little like curl the finger like come here. Yeah, he's
just immediately like taking his tie off.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Yeah, Like he's like an extra and a Benny Hill sketch,
and he is already at that like that frantic speed.

Speaker 3 (01:03:34):
Yeah. Yeah, So she kills him.

Speaker 2 (01:03:39):
And then meanwhile back at the mall, we're back at
the mall again the lovebirds Max and Oh.

Speaker 3 (01:03:46):
Sorry. This this is the scene I mentioned earlier where
it was really funny how they were running. They were
on the run, and they're just suddenly at the mall
and it seems like they're kind of taking it easy.
They're just shopping.

Speaker 2 (01:03:55):
Yeah, Max and Erica. Here are on the run from
a supernatural uh avatar of vengeance, and they're like, what
if we went shopping? Maybe went to the food mall,
and so that's what they decided to do. Maybe they're thinking,
you know where we'd be saved from Lady Terminator, a
place with high population density. So of course Lady Terminator

(01:04:18):
shows up again. More gunshots, more bystander deaths.

Speaker 3 (01:04:22):
This is full of glass.

Speaker 2 (01:04:23):
Yeah, more glasses shattered, and our hero and heroin drive
off again, this time I believe, intending to meet the
rest of the team at the airport for a final
showdown with Lady Terminator. This is another scene where everyone
steals at least one car for the next phase of
the action.

Speaker 3 (01:04:41):
Yes, but man, when they get to the to the
airport runway for the final action scene, this is a
good final showdown. Yeah, give it two thumbs up. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:04:49):
I definitely had some jaw dropping moments here and also
some enormous laughs. One early on is you know everyone
knows im Predator. We get that great Dutch Dylan hand.
I guess you'd call it a handshake. It's like the
muscle moment where to arm wrestling in the air sort
of yeah, like that's of course an awesome, iconic moment.

(01:05:10):
But this film has four heroes working together, so we
get a quadruple Dutch Dylan Predator handshake and.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
It's it's glorious, it's really good.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
And we have plenty of red shirts around him that
are obviously gonna get blasted. So yeah, basically everyone ends
up on the airport tarmac and multiple elements are in
play here. We have Lady Terminator driving around in a car. Yes,
a helicopter is in play shooting air to ground missiles
at Lady Terminator.

Speaker 3 (01:05:38):
Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
Then we have Snakes show up and he's a what
is he in? Like some sort of armored personnel carrier.

Speaker 3 (01:05:44):
They call it the panzer. It looked to me just
like a truck with like some stuff built around it
to make it look like a like a tank of
some kind. But he's driving it and he's like ramming
her with it and just cussing her out as he
rams into her. That's so funny.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Is profanity here?

Speaker 3 (01:06:01):
Yeah?

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
The enthusiasm of the delivery is great though, Yes, so good.
So yeah, he rams or he like ty bones her vehicle,
but she's clearly still a lot still alive, so Snake
runs for it, and then the mustachioed guy who I
think is named Joe, fires a bazooka at her as
well as the suddenly adjacent fuel tanker, and there's an

(01:06:23):
enormous explosion, and I think it's Max who says, yeah,
that should be enough to kill anybody.

Speaker 3 (01:06:28):
Yeah, yeah, but hey, we've seen Terminator, right. The Terminator
gets blown up in an exploding tanker and they think
they're safe, and they're not. Of course, it's going to
rise up, having all of the flesh burned off of
it and now being only the metal endoskeleton underneath. Not
quite the case. Instead, she turns into a half melted

(01:06:48):
sort of zombie being.

Speaker 2 (01:06:50):
Yeah yeah, kind of a zombie burnt up zombifide form here,
and she's even more unstoppable. Now. This is one of
the cases where you often see some the hero does it,
sometimes the villain does it. But late stage they find
that that higher year that unlocks additional weaponry that seems
like could have been useful earlier in the picture, in

(01:07:12):
this case laser eyes.

Speaker 3 (01:07:13):
And this is how our beloved Snake meets his end.
I hated that they that they laser beam snake.

Speaker 2 (01:07:19):
Yeah, snake eats it here, takes some laser beams to
the chest. I think they shoot her like a million
more times, and she keeps coming, and we do get
a moment where Max is like he acknowledges Snake's death
and he goes so long, buddy.

Speaker 3 (01:07:35):
Oh, there's a couple of moments like that. There's another
one where she the helicopter swoops down and catches her
in a net.

Speaker 2 (01:07:41):
Oh my god, Yeah, that was crazy. Catches her in
a net. And then what does she do. She looks
up and I blast the chopper and herself out of
the sky.

Speaker 3 (01:07:50):
Yeah, she blows up the chopper. And then we cut
to one of the buddies there who one of the
guys says, it just kind of like blankly says, like, Tom,
it's so hilarious, like while the helicopter is still exploding
mid fireball.

Speaker 2 (01:08:07):
Shrapnel flying everywhere, but he takes a moment to be like, yeah,
tom my buddy.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
And then that Tom in the helicopter, I was confused that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:14):
I don't think we knew that that was not the
other Tom. That will I think get back to here
in just a second. That was a different Tom. She
proceeds to so Lady Terminator at this point just proceeds
to blow everyone and everything up with her ie beams
and seemingly kills the other Tom or the Tom Prime
we'll call him in the process, the one played by

(01:08:35):
the rockstar that we referenced earlier. Okay, Max runs out
of AMMO. He tries to club Lady T with his
machine gun, but she, you know, quickly like bashes him,
beats him up, and now it's just Lady T chasing
Erica up the stairs of what I assumed to be
like an air traffic control tower. And things are feeling
really dire here because there's no way there's going to

(01:08:56):
be an industrial hydraulic press up there, you know, to
the Terminator.

Speaker 3 (01:09:01):
That's right, So what's she gonna do? But you do
see tucked into the back of her clothes as she's
running up the stairs, she still got the wrapped up
gift from her grand uncle.

Speaker 2 (01:09:10):
Ah, the Sacred Chris. Yes, I didn't even notice it
in her belt here, so I'd kind of forgotten about it.
Because up at the top of the tower, Lady Terminator
catches up, goes in for the kill. Max catches up,
but he's not much use. She like throws him down
a flight of stairs, and then she climbs on top
of Erica and begins to like strangle her or something.

(01:09:33):
But then that's when Erica pulls out the Chris.

Speaker 3 (01:09:36):
And is it sort of a Highlander type defeating the
monster here? Is there some lightning involved?

Speaker 2 (01:09:42):
Yeah, this is great because she stabs a lady terminator
with the Chris. There's like a quickening explosion with the
animated blue lightning, and then the Chris floats in the air,
glows and shoots off like a space ship into the night.

Speaker 3 (01:09:56):
Beautiful magnifico.

Speaker 2 (01:09:59):
So it's been this whole time, but now it seems
like the sun is coming up, a light is coming
back into the world. And so now we see our
surviving couple. They've been bandaged up. They're grieving for the
dead as they take them by on stretchers, and then
they bring by Tom on his stretcher and he's seemingly
still alive, and we get this great little exchange with

(01:10:20):
him where he says, I want to live forever.

Speaker 3 (01:10:22):
That's great. I don't know, that's actually an interesting, nice
kind of line. Yeah, discovers after having been eyeball blasted
by Lady Terminator or whatever happened to him.

Speaker 2 (01:10:34):
I forget, Yeah, he'd send you. He was definitely eyeball blasted,
and he was shot with the ballistics earlier, so he's
been through it at this point. But now his new
goal is to just maybe not die, maybe ever. And
I think it's understandable given what he suffered.

Speaker 3 (01:10:49):
Oh but hey, remember that voice that came in with
narration at the beginning about the cupboards of recorded time.
Oh yeah, comes back at the end. So as there's
like a sunset or not sunset, it's the sunrise. I
guess everything's going okay now, And the voice comes in
that says, the struggle within our souls is never ending.
The life of man short and brutal, torn between good

(01:11:12):
and evil. Of the eternity around us, we know nothing.
The stars look on They have been here long before
man appeared on our small planet, and they will be
here after we are no more. The end beautiful. What
what does that have to do with it?

Speaker 2 (01:11:29):
I feel like it's a message that we learn too late,
that's for sure. Now it really does feel like the
opening narration and the closing narration were perhaps one narration
bit and They were like, should we put this at
the beginning or should we put at the end, And
they're like, no, let's split it up.

Speaker 3 (01:11:45):
Split the difference. Yeah, he learned only too late that
eel is a biting creature.

Speaker 2 (01:11:52):
I guess the message is beware the south Sea Queen. Really,
that's it just seems like a warning. I don't. I
think that's the main main error in anyone's ways here
is don't tangle with the south Sea Queen.

Speaker 3 (01:12:04):
I think that is it. Yes, if you know there,
if you know of an evil deep sea sex goddess somewhere,
you should you should not go to her palace.

Speaker 2 (01:12:12):
That's right. Even if you yourself are very confident. Think
about your great grandchildren. Yeah, think about the legacy of
your poor decisions. Beautiful though she may be.

Speaker 3 (01:12:22):
Well, that was Lady Terminator again. I think one of
the wildest and funniest movies we have watched for this show.

Speaker 2 (01:12:30):
Absolutely, it's like both of these films. Not for everyone,
but if it's for you, boy, it's a treat.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
Yeah, you're gonna need to be comfortable with a good
bit of sex and violence. But it doesn't get much
more absurd than this.

Speaker 2 (01:12:43):
All right, we're gonna go ahead and close out this
episode of Weird House Cinema, but we'd love to hear from
everyone out there. If you have other suggestions from the
world of Indonesian cinema that you would like us to consider,
write in. We would love to hear from you. Just
remind her that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily
a science and culture pod with core episodes on Tuesdays
and Thursdays and the Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast feed,

(01:13:04):
But on Fridays we put out Weird House Cinema, which
is our chance to set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film and at least as
an experiment. Weird House Cinema also has its own separate
playlist feed wherever you get your podcasts, however you're getting
Weird House Cinema. If you like it, leave a nice review,
leave some nice stars behind. That's a good way to

(01:13:25):
make sure we get to keep doing this. And if
you want to follow us on social media, we are
STBYM podcast on Instagram and on letterboxed. If you are
a letterbox user, you will find us as Weird House.
We have a nice list of all the films we've
covered over the years, and sometimes there's a peak ahead
at what's coming up next.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:14:03):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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