Hey guyz, thee OSCARS are tomoro! (Today if u r AmeriCANT!) They ar vere importent in the filmy world and all serious blogz gotta have their pix! (I even got the memoe LOLZ)
HERE are my choices, which are 1000% guaranteed to be unbased ... unbiazed ... nuetral! I mean ... becuase I live in Noo Zeeland where non uf da movees r released yet! MayB I hav 2 go 2 MegaUpload 2 get them! MEGALOLZ (BECAUSE THEY'RE BUSTED AND THAT GUY IS FAT!!!!!)
N E way ...
BEST PICTURE
THAT ARTISTY WEINSTEIN ONE
THAT HORSEY THAT SAVES THE WAR ONE
THE WOODY ALLEN ONE THAT'S ONCE AGAIN HIS BEST ONE SINCE THE 80s, JUST LIKE EVERY MOVIE HE MAKES
THE REMAKE OF THE ADAPTATION OF THE BOOK
THE RACISM IS BAD ONE
THAT ONE WHERE SCORCESE LIKES OLD MOVIES
BEST DIRECTOR
GOODFELLAS DUDE
ANNIE HALL DUDE
SIDEWAYS DUDE
HOOK DUDE
WEINSTEIN DUDE
BEST ACTOR
THE GUY FROM ER
THE GUY FROM MEET JOE BLACK
THREE OTHER GUYS THAT NOBODY CARES BECAUSE THEY WILL LOSE!!!!!!!!
BEST ACTRESS
THE GIRL WHO PIERCED HER NIPPLES
THE WOMAN THAT DRESSES LIKE A GUY (NOT HILARY SWANK)
THE WOMAN WHO DRESSES LIKE MARILYN MONROE
OH SHIT WE BETTER NOMINATE SOMEONE BLACK SO NOBODY GETS MAD FOR FIRING THE BLACK HOST
MERYL FUCKING STREEP COULD READ THE PHONE BOOK AND GET NOMINATED
No1 cares abowt ne othr of the Oscars!!!!! GO OSCARS!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
A Four Letter Word
Yesterday, Drew McWeeny wrote a strong, provocative article about rape in cinema. It's not a call for censorship, just a personal statement of what he is no longer interested in watching, but in terms of his observations on the larger picture, the money quote for me is this:
"We have created a code of film language in which the single most destructive act of sexual violence is perfect(ly - sic) acceptable to depict in the most graphic, clinical detail, but actual love-making has been all but banished from mainstream film."
For those unfamiliar, he's basically referring to the fact that SHAME got an NC-17 in the States for portraying its lead's penis (and possibly some sex acts; I haven't seen, so don't know all the details), thus blocking not only any youth from seeing it cinematically but also barring its distribution from most cinemas ...
... whilst THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO contained horrific rape scenes, and anyone in America can take their 5-year old to watch it.
That's the horror of the American system, and that's how we reflect our values onscreen. Which could be a whole blog in itself.
Now, in terms of my thoughts overall on Drew's article, I had four reactions:
1. Many of the commenters, all too predictably, have been unable to read his piece as largely a descriptive reaction about his feelings, and instead immediately leapt to the presumption that it was a prescriptive call for a ban on rape on cinema or some such. The fact is, as cinema fans, the discussions that we have about content generally remain at an infantile level of "censorship bad!" "rape bad!". And it's a fucking shame. Because this is a nuanced issue, and while most of us can see the line between THE ACCUSED and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (unwisely naming two films about rape I haven't seen, but hey), every single point along that line is a grey area you can argue either side of. And as adults, it would be nice to elevate the discussion. I've noticed the preponderance of rapes of late in cinema as well, particularly exploitation movies, and question their motive in some cases.
2. Along these lines: one interesting point here is McWeeny is a staunch defender of A SERBIAN FILM and THE WOMAN, two of the most controversial films of the past two years in terms of content. If you haven't heard of A SERBIAN FILM, I'm not even sure I can recommend looking up a plot review, as it's that beyond the pale in terms of content. Whilst I haven't seen it, I'm aware of many of the more disturbing scenes. Now, THE DIVIDE is the film that McWeeny uses as a whipping boy in his post, but he doesn't mention either of these other films, both of which he's defended on the grounds of allegory in the past.
I personally remain unconvinced that allegory or theme is a sufficiently elevated reason to go from excoriating a film for its rape-related content to praising it. In fact, in many cases, I think it's the opposite: the theme is used as a justification to include extreme content because it's somehow deep and important. It's not necessarily any more sophisticated than the difference between a child lying and a child who crosses his fingers when lying. In the latter case, he thinks it's "okay".
But it's not. Not to me, anyway. Not intrinsically.
I have not watched A SERBIAN FILM, and I walked out of THE WOMAN. (Long story.) So debating those films is difficult. But, similarly, Drew didn't finish THE DIVIDE. Does he know that it doesn't become an allegory for French colonialism in Africa in the end or something? And if it did, would that make it a better film, or retroactively justify the rape scene?
3. I do think there is a difference between historical films and current films. I watched BONE the other night, which is a fantastic, interesting film with some horrifically embarrassingly offensive sexual politics. I think anyone who's interested in exploitation film or innovative film, who's not bothered by that content, should definitely see it. That's just one example of, literally, hundreds we can choose.
But BONE is a product of its time, and we're a product of ours.
4. And here's something we know now that maybe we didn't know then, certainly not in such concrete terms. As anyone who's been unfortunate to stay still long enough next to me knows, I'm also fascinated with neuroscience. Total amateur hobbyist kind of stuff, no one to be truly trusted on the topic. But one aphorism that sticks with me is from Dr. Norman Doidge's book, THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF, and it's a simple one: "neurons that fire together, wire together".
Why is this relevant? People that get raped go through a traumatic experience. Exposure to depictions of rape will, most likely, lead to the neural pathways of the memory of that rape, and by extension, that trauma.
A statistic that got dropped in the comment thread in McWeeny's article is that 1 in 4 women are raped. I don't know if that's true. But say it's 1 in 5, or 1 in 6, or even 1 in 10.
Now, take all the women that you've ever met in your life, and divide by 4, or 5, or 6, or 10. That's probably the number of rape victims you know, whether or not you know it.
And - and I know this is an obvious point by now, but I'm belaboring it intentionally, as it seems to be lost on many - every film featuring a rape is asking those friends of yours, those potential audience members, and everyone like them around the world, to relive that experience.
(And before we go on NO I AM NOT ASKING RAPE TO BE CENSORED FROM CINEMA DID YOU NOT READ POINT 1. ok. deep breath.)
But - look. As a filmmaker, I've never come up with a script that I feel so strongly about that it's important enough to ask an audience to go through that. But I won't say I never will. Certainly, there are other filmmakers who may have thought it through and decided yes, it is important. And some very great films, some very controversial films, feature strong, challenging rape scenes, and they're films I would recommend to an appropriate audience.
In the end, though, I think all that Drew wants, all that a lot of people want, is when we sit down to a movie, for the director to have thought through its effect on an audience as well.
Is that too much to ask?
"We have created a code of film language in which the single most destructive act of sexual violence is perfect(ly - sic) acceptable to depict in the most graphic, clinical detail, but actual love-making has been all but banished from mainstream film."
For those unfamiliar, he's basically referring to the fact that SHAME got an NC-17 in the States for portraying its lead's penis (and possibly some sex acts; I haven't seen, so don't know all the details), thus blocking not only any youth from seeing it cinematically but also barring its distribution from most cinemas ...
... whilst THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO contained horrific rape scenes, and anyone in America can take their 5-year old to watch it.
That's the horror of the American system, and that's how we reflect our values onscreen. Which could be a whole blog in itself.
Now, in terms of my thoughts overall on Drew's article, I had four reactions:
1. Many of the commenters, all too predictably, have been unable to read his piece as largely a descriptive reaction about his feelings, and instead immediately leapt to the presumption that it was a prescriptive call for a ban on rape on cinema or some such. The fact is, as cinema fans, the discussions that we have about content generally remain at an infantile level of "censorship bad!" "rape bad!". And it's a fucking shame. Because this is a nuanced issue, and while most of us can see the line between THE ACCUSED and I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (unwisely naming two films about rape I haven't seen, but hey), every single point along that line is a grey area you can argue either side of. And as adults, it would be nice to elevate the discussion. I've noticed the preponderance of rapes of late in cinema as well, particularly exploitation movies, and question their motive in some cases.
2. Along these lines: one interesting point here is McWeeny is a staunch defender of A SERBIAN FILM and THE WOMAN, two of the most controversial films of the past two years in terms of content. If you haven't heard of A SERBIAN FILM, I'm not even sure I can recommend looking up a plot review, as it's that beyond the pale in terms of content. Whilst I haven't seen it, I'm aware of many of the more disturbing scenes. Now, THE DIVIDE is the film that McWeeny uses as a whipping boy in his post, but he doesn't mention either of these other films, both of which he's defended on the grounds of allegory in the past.
I personally remain unconvinced that allegory or theme is a sufficiently elevated reason to go from excoriating a film for its rape-related content to praising it. In fact, in many cases, I think it's the opposite: the theme is used as a justification to include extreme content because it's somehow deep and important. It's not necessarily any more sophisticated than the difference between a child lying and a child who crosses his fingers when lying. In the latter case, he thinks it's "okay".
But it's not. Not to me, anyway. Not intrinsically.
I have not watched A SERBIAN FILM, and I walked out of THE WOMAN. (Long story.) So debating those films is difficult. But, similarly, Drew didn't finish THE DIVIDE. Does he know that it doesn't become an allegory for French colonialism in Africa in the end or something? And if it did, would that make it a better film, or retroactively justify the rape scene?
3. I do think there is a difference between historical films and current films. I watched BONE the other night, which is a fantastic, interesting film with some horrifically embarrassingly offensive sexual politics. I think anyone who's interested in exploitation film or innovative film, who's not bothered by that content, should definitely see it. That's just one example of, literally, hundreds we can choose.
But BONE is a product of its time, and we're a product of ours.
4. And here's something we know now that maybe we didn't know then, certainly not in such concrete terms. As anyone who's been unfortunate to stay still long enough next to me knows, I'm also fascinated with neuroscience. Total amateur hobbyist kind of stuff, no one to be truly trusted on the topic. But one aphorism that sticks with me is from Dr. Norman Doidge's book, THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF, and it's a simple one: "neurons that fire together, wire together".
Why is this relevant? People that get raped go through a traumatic experience. Exposure to depictions of rape will, most likely, lead to the neural pathways of the memory of that rape, and by extension, that trauma.
A statistic that got dropped in the comment thread in McWeeny's article is that 1 in 4 women are raped. I don't know if that's true. But say it's 1 in 5, or 1 in 6, or even 1 in 10.
Now, take all the women that you've ever met in your life, and divide by 4, or 5, or 6, or 10. That's probably the number of rape victims you know, whether or not you know it.
And - and I know this is an obvious point by now, but I'm belaboring it intentionally, as it seems to be lost on many - every film featuring a rape is asking those friends of yours, those potential audience members, and everyone like them around the world, to relive that experience.
(And before we go on NO I AM NOT ASKING RAPE TO BE CENSORED FROM CINEMA DID YOU NOT READ POINT 1. ok. deep breath.)
But - look. As a filmmaker, I've never come up with a script that I feel so strongly about that it's important enough to ask an audience to go through that. But I won't say I never will. Certainly, there are other filmmakers who may have thought it through and decided yes, it is important. And some very great films, some very controversial films, feature strong, challenging rape scenes, and they're films I would recommend to an appropriate audience.
In the end, though, I think all that Drew wants, all that a lot of people want, is when we sit down to a movie, for the director to have thought through its effect on an audience as well.
Is that too much to ask?
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
ECSTASY AND BLOOD: THE BRILLIANCE OF LADY TERMINATOR
(Note: I wrote this for a book that the excellent film writer and all-around awesome guy Craig D. Lindsey was assembling on 80's action cinema. For reasons that I don't know in full, the book never came to be, and with Craig's blessing, I'm posting just what the world needs: 20+ paragraphs on one of my favorite films ever. Most of my background info comes from the DVD supplements; a month or so after I submitted this article, this interview with Barbara Anne Constable, her first ever, went online, which fills in many, many more blanks for the curious reader.)
ECSTASY AND BLOOD: THE BRILLIANCE OF LADY TERMINATOR
To explain to the uninitiated why H. Tjut Djalil's LADY TERMINATOR is in fact the best movie in the world - once minor considerations such as taste, logic, and good acting are removed from the equation, anyway - a thought experiment may be helpful.
Imagine you are a low-budget Indonesian exploitation film producer, working for P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, and on the heels of the success of TERMINATOR, you've commissioned a low-budget ripoff. Maybe you've even come up with the name, and possibly even a tagline. (My favorite: "First she mates ... then she terminates!") All you need is a script.
And, one after another, they come: all the thinly veiled transmutations of the TERMINATOR story, with all the originality you might expect. An endless cookie cutter string of them. And then, one day, you hear a pitch that's rather different.
Specifically, it starts 100 years in the past, and involves a woman who has a snake living in her vagina that bites off the penis of any man who is unable to give her sexual pleasure.
(Presumably you, oh hallowed employee of P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, are leaning forward at this point, either in extreme interest or extreme confusion, thus foreshadowing the reaction pretty much any sane person will have to the entire running time of LADY TERMINATOR.)
This woman - the South Seas Queen, as it transpires - finds herself on the back foot one day, when one man, unexpectedly, gives her sexual pleasure, and catching her unawares, removes the snake and, using magic hand powers, transmutes it into a dagger. All of this leads to the South Seas Queen cursing his progeny, which takes us to the present day, and a beautiful anthropology student investigating the South Seas Queen, and ... well, you can see where this is going, can't you?
If you're this functionary of P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, your answer is: into production.
Thought experiment over. When I describe this story to people who need convincing that there is no better use of their time than watching LADY TERMINATOR, they are generally convinced that they are in for one of the most batshit insane experiences of their filmgoing lives. Which is in fact true. But what's really remarkable about LADY TERMINATOR is, in fact, that the plot device of the South Seas Queen is possibly one of the MOST explicable things about this film.
"The most important thing in a film is the script. It's like a blueprint for building a house." - H. Tjut Djalil.
The South Seas Queen isn't the product of the imagination of a feverish mind, or if it is, not one that was writing rip-offs of Hollywood films in 1988. It's actually an ancient Javanese legend. On the Region 1 Mondo Macabro DANGEROUS SEDUCTRESS DVD, there's an interview with Djalil where he explains that there's actually two versions of the legend, one from west Java and one from central Java, and that the west Javanese version seemed more adaptable. And in the context of low-budget production, using a story set in the past means that you don't have the art department requirements of setting something in the future - just dig up some old costumes, wall hangings, and a four-poster bed, and you can be shooting by the afternoon!
(You might think, also, that there's a benefit about using an ancient legend, because it's in public domain and free of copyright entanglements. Then you remind yourself that the film in question is in fact LADY TERMINATOR, and that the chance of any such niceties being a concern to anyone at P.T. Soraya Intercine Films is next to nil.)
The legend also has the advantage of seamlessly introducing into the TERMINATOR mythos the magic, missing element of the original movie: copious sex and nudity. From our present-day vantage, it's easy to imagine a version of LADY TERMINATOR that's an ode to female empowerment. Despite multiple bloody castration scenes (on behalf of that aforementioned snake), it's safe to say that this film has other things on its mind.
“''Lady Terminator'' may sound like a female counterpart of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film ''The Terminator.'' In fact, it is a vile reversal of those nauseating movies whose point is to show naked women being hacked to pieces ... (it) is too lurid, repulsive, and psychologically warped for audiences to laugh at its badly dubbed English and thoroughly amateurish production values. Its single redeeming feature is that the ending does not promise a sequel.”- Caryn James, from the New York Times review of LADY TERMINATOR.
To underline the most significant fact about that quote, and to me far less explicable than the fact that a TERMINATOR rip-off involves Javanese legend and a snake living in a woman's vagina - LADY TERMINATOR was actually reviewed in the New York Times, and actually had a theatrical release in the States. From the far-distant remove of 2010, it's hard to imagine a non-ironic theatrical release of a film like this today, even in a small release pattern.
But in the late 80’s, these movies weren’t being sold to a jaded, ironic audience – they were sold to a diminishing but eager audience who wanted sex and violence in bucketfuls, and on this account, to say that LADY TERMINATOR does not disappoint is an understatement. And that’s part of the joy of watching LADY TERMINATOR, especially with an appreciative audience – it’s impossible not to revel in its excess. In this movie, it’s not enough for Lady Terminator to machine-gun a guard from a balcony, watch him land on a car, throw him on the ground, and machine-gun him at least 30 additional times from three different cameras – this sequence ends with Lady Terminator kicking him in the balls as she walks away, for good measure.
And it’s moments like this that the enjoyment of LADY TERMINATOR as a piece of “so-bad-it’s good” cinema collides with a feeling that is virtually indistinguishable from the glorious excesses of action cinema that are enjoyed as pure pleasures. It’s tempting to lump in LADY TERMINATOR with TROLL 2 or THE ROOM as a disasterpiece of gigantic proportions, but it’s neither accurate nor fair. All of those films are enjoyable precisely because they fail in such a committed way. As a director, Djalil couldn’t be called talented, per se, but he has at least a passing sense of where to put the camera more often than not, and a fair number of the film’s directorial failures, technically speaking, are borne of over-ambition rather than unremitting ineptitude. (An impending tidal wave that capsizes a boat early on, for instance, seems like an eighteen-inch tall wave photographed at a high angle.)
As a director of actors, it’s hard to be as forgiving. To be fair, once lead actress Barbara Anne Constable becomes possessed by the South Seas Queen and becomes the Lady Terminator, her woodenness almost becomes a virtue; until then, her plausibility as an anthropology student rivals Denise Richards’ turn in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH as a nuclear physicist. And while leads Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker) and Max (Christopher J. Hart) are pretty banal, I’ve seen worse. (Despite those glowing endorsements, none of the three seem to have appeared in any other movies.) There’s not much that can mitigate the sheer awfulness of a litany of supporting performances, however, from the cackling undersexed drinkers on the beach who are Lady Terminator’s first victims to the completely irrelevant stoner friend of Max (named “Snake”) to the bellhop who is overeager to jump in bed with our titular character, not to mention any number of random people who get shot by machine guns and writhe in ludicrous ways.
There’s a mitigating issue with judging the quality of the performances in LADY TERMINATOR (not to mention the script), though, which is that the only copies I’ve been able to find are dubbed into English. While many assert that that’s the original source language of the film, Djalil makes it clear in his interview that it was dubbed for export. I’m of mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m historically a purist when it comes to insisting on watching foreign cinema in its original language, and there’s something condescending about finding a film laughable on the basis of its bad dubbing. On the other hand, the dubbing work in LADY TERMINATOR is a glorious gift to the world, without which we would have never had such lines as:
- “I’m not a lady, I’m an anthropologist!”
- “I think I’ll marry my right fist, I use it so much already!”
- “Wow, that’s what I call police brutality, man.”
- “Listen, Jack and I have seen more dead bodies than you’ve eaten hot dogs, so shut up and eat!”
- “I’ve heard of the ultimate blow job, but uh… this is too much!”
- “Come with me if you want to live!”
Ok, in the case of the last line, that’s not remotely true. It is, of course, just one thing of many in this film blatantly lifted from THE TERMINATOR. And it’s the tension between making a movie that makes sense and having to arbitrarily fit increasingly irrelevant references to the original film in that help make LADY TERMINATOR such a singularly bizarre film. This incongruity reaches its apex in the scene where Lady Terminator cuts her eyeball out and washes it in the sink. Why? There are only two possible reasons: one of them might have to do with some mysterious energy ball that a mystic hits her with in the eye earlier, and the other might have to do with its notoriety from the original film.
(As an aside, the random descents into mystic shit flying out of people’s eyes or other locations are pretty stunning for their arbitrariness, especially given Lady Terminator’s over-reliance on machine-gunning the opposition. But Djalil is also the director of MYSTICS IN BALI, and fans of that movie will find some similar effects going on here; and even the plot of a woman interested in something of supernatural origin is slightly similar in structure.)
It’s easy to make fun of the endless TERMINATOR rip-offs, but just when you think you’ve seen everything LADY TERMINATOR has to offer – including a final, no-budget variant on the original TERMINATOR’s endo-skeleton reveal - there’s something even more unexpected.
“The struggle within our souls is never-ending. The life of man short and brutal, torn between good and evil. Of the eternity around us, we know nothing. The stars look on. They have been here long before mankind appeared on our small planet, and will be here long after we are no more.”
Those are the final lines of narration in LADY TERMINATOR.
Yes, really.
At what point someone decided LADY TERMINATOR needed to provide an excursis on existentialist philosophy as an outro, I have no idea. But this is just one of the many mysteries and glories of LADY TERMINATOR, a film that keeps on giving, a film whose greatest mystery may just be that, despite being designed as an eminently disposable rip-off, it has endured as not just one of the most enjoyable action films of its era but a truly astonishing, singular film, one that will bring more joy to your life than you could imagine any film involving multiple castration scenes possibly could.
ECSTASY AND BLOOD: THE BRILLIANCE OF LADY TERMINATOR
To explain to the uninitiated why H. Tjut Djalil's LADY TERMINATOR is in fact the best movie in the world - once minor considerations such as taste, logic, and good acting are removed from the equation, anyway - a thought experiment may be helpful.
Imagine you are a low-budget Indonesian exploitation film producer, working for P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, and on the heels of the success of TERMINATOR, you've commissioned a low-budget ripoff. Maybe you've even come up with the name, and possibly even a tagline. (My favorite: "First she mates ... then she terminates!") All you need is a script.
And, one after another, they come: all the thinly veiled transmutations of the TERMINATOR story, with all the originality you might expect. An endless cookie cutter string of them. And then, one day, you hear a pitch that's rather different.
Specifically, it starts 100 years in the past, and involves a woman who has a snake living in her vagina that bites off the penis of any man who is unable to give her sexual pleasure.
(Presumably you, oh hallowed employee of P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, are leaning forward at this point, either in extreme interest or extreme confusion, thus foreshadowing the reaction pretty much any sane person will have to the entire running time of LADY TERMINATOR.)
This woman - the South Seas Queen, as it transpires - finds herself on the back foot one day, when one man, unexpectedly, gives her sexual pleasure, and catching her unawares, removes the snake and, using magic hand powers, transmutes it into a dagger. All of this leads to the South Seas Queen cursing his progeny, which takes us to the present day, and a beautiful anthropology student investigating the South Seas Queen, and ... well, you can see where this is going, can't you?
If you're this functionary of P.T. Soraya Intercine Films, your answer is: into production.
Thought experiment over. When I describe this story to people who need convincing that there is no better use of their time than watching LADY TERMINATOR, they are generally convinced that they are in for one of the most batshit insane experiences of their filmgoing lives. Which is in fact true. But what's really remarkable about LADY TERMINATOR is, in fact, that the plot device of the South Seas Queen is possibly one of the MOST explicable things about this film.
"The most important thing in a film is the script. It's like a blueprint for building a house." - H. Tjut Djalil.
The South Seas Queen isn't the product of the imagination of a feverish mind, or if it is, not one that was writing rip-offs of Hollywood films in 1988. It's actually an ancient Javanese legend. On the Region 1 Mondo Macabro DANGEROUS SEDUCTRESS DVD, there's an interview with Djalil where he explains that there's actually two versions of the legend, one from west Java and one from central Java, and that the west Javanese version seemed more adaptable. And in the context of low-budget production, using a story set in the past means that you don't have the art department requirements of setting something in the future - just dig up some old costumes, wall hangings, and a four-poster bed, and you can be shooting by the afternoon!
(You might think, also, that there's a benefit about using an ancient legend, because it's in public domain and free of copyright entanglements. Then you remind yourself that the film in question is in fact LADY TERMINATOR, and that the chance of any such niceties being a concern to anyone at P.T. Soraya Intercine Films is next to nil.)
The legend also has the advantage of seamlessly introducing into the TERMINATOR mythos the magic, missing element of the original movie: copious sex and nudity. From our present-day vantage, it's easy to imagine a version of LADY TERMINATOR that's an ode to female empowerment. Despite multiple bloody castration scenes (on behalf of that aforementioned snake), it's safe to say that this film has other things on its mind.
“''Lady Terminator'' may sound like a female counterpart of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film ''The Terminator.'' In fact, it is a vile reversal of those nauseating movies whose point is to show naked women being hacked to pieces ... (it) is too lurid, repulsive, and psychologically warped for audiences to laugh at its badly dubbed English and thoroughly amateurish production values. Its single redeeming feature is that the ending does not promise a sequel.”- Caryn James, from the New York Times review of LADY TERMINATOR.
To underline the most significant fact about that quote, and to me far less explicable than the fact that a TERMINATOR rip-off involves Javanese legend and a snake living in a woman's vagina - LADY TERMINATOR was actually reviewed in the New York Times, and actually had a theatrical release in the States. From the far-distant remove of 2010, it's hard to imagine a non-ironic theatrical release of a film like this today, even in a small release pattern.
But in the late 80’s, these movies weren’t being sold to a jaded, ironic audience – they were sold to a diminishing but eager audience who wanted sex and violence in bucketfuls, and on this account, to say that LADY TERMINATOR does not disappoint is an understatement. And that’s part of the joy of watching LADY TERMINATOR, especially with an appreciative audience – it’s impossible not to revel in its excess. In this movie, it’s not enough for Lady Terminator to machine-gun a guard from a balcony, watch him land on a car, throw him on the ground, and machine-gun him at least 30 additional times from three different cameras – this sequence ends with Lady Terminator kicking him in the balls as she walks away, for good measure.
And it’s moments like this that the enjoyment of LADY TERMINATOR as a piece of “so-bad-it’s good” cinema collides with a feeling that is virtually indistinguishable from the glorious excesses of action cinema that are enjoyed as pure pleasures. It’s tempting to lump in LADY TERMINATOR with TROLL 2 or THE ROOM as a disasterpiece of gigantic proportions, but it’s neither accurate nor fair. All of those films are enjoyable precisely because they fail in such a committed way. As a director, Djalil couldn’t be called talented, per se, but he has at least a passing sense of where to put the camera more often than not, and a fair number of the film’s directorial failures, technically speaking, are borne of over-ambition rather than unremitting ineptitude. (An impending tidal wave that capsizes a boat early on, for instance, seems like an eighteen-inch tall wave photographed at a high angle.)
As a director of actors, it’s hard to be as forgiving. To be fair, once lead actress Barbara Anne Constable becomes possessed by the South Seas Queen and becomes the Lady Terminator, her woodenness almost becomes a virtue; until then, her plausibility as an anthropology student rivals Denise Richards’ turn in THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH as a nuclear physicist. And while leads Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker) and Max (Christopher J. Hart) are pretty banal, I’ve seen worse. (Despite those glowing endorsements, none of the three seem to have appeared in any other movies.) There’s not much that can mitigate the sheer awfulness of a litany of supporting performances, however, from the cackling undersexed drinkers on the beach who are Lady Terminator’s first victims to the completely irrelevant stoner friend of Max (named “Snake”) to the bellhop who is overeager to jump in bed with our titular character, not to mention any number of random people who get shot by machine guns and writhe in ludicrous ways.
There’s a mitigating issue with judging the quality of the performances in LADY TERMINATOR (not to mention the script), though, which is that the only copies I’ve been able to find are dubbed into English. While many assert that that’s the original source language of the film, Djalil makes it clear in his interview that it was dubbed for export. I’m of mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I’m historically a purist when it comes to insisting on watching foreign cinema in its original language, and there’s something condescending about finding a film laughable on the basis of its bad dubbing. On the other hand, the dubbing work in LADY TERMINATOR is a glorious gift to the world, without which we would have never had such lines as:
- “I’m not a lady, I’m an anthropologist!”
- “I think I’ll marry my right fist, I use it so much already!”
- “Wow, that’s what I call police brutality, man.”
- “Listen, Jack and I have seen more dead bodies than you’ve eaten hot dogs, so shut up and eat!”
- “I’ve heard of the ultimate blow job, but uh… this is too much!”
- “Come with me if you want to live!”
Ok, in the case of the last line, that’s not remotely true. It is, of course, just one thing of many in this film blatantly lifted from THE TERMINATOR. And it’s the tension between making a movie that makes sense and having to arbitrarily fit increasingly irrelevant references to the original film in that help make LADY TERMINATOR such a singularly bizarre film. This incongruity reaches its apex in the scene where Lady Terminator cuts her eyeball out and washes it in the sink. Why? There are only two possible reasons: one of them might have to do with some mysterious energy ball that a mystic hits her with in the eye earlier, and the other might have to do with its notoriety from the original film.
(As an aside, the random descents into mystic shit flying out of people’s eyes or other locations are pretty stunning for their arbitrariness, especially given Lady Terminator’s over-reliance on machine-gunning the opposition. But Djalil is also the director of MYSTICS IN BALI, and fans of that movie will find some similar effects going on here; and even the plot of a woman interested in something of supernatural origin is slightly similar in structure.)
It’s easy to make fun of the endless TERMINATOR rip-offs, but just when you think you’ve seen everything LADY TERMINATOR has to offer – including a final, no-budget variant on the original TERMINATOR’s endo-skeleton reveal - there’s something even more unexpected.
“The struggle within our souls is never-ending. The life of man short and brutal, torn between good and evil. Of the eternity around us, we know nothing. The stars look on. They have been here long before mankind appeared on our small planet, and will be here long after we are no more.”
Those are the final lines of narration in LADY TERMINATOR.
Yes, really.
At what point someone decided LADY TERMINATOR needed to provide an excursis on existentialist philosophy as an outro, I have no idea. But this is just one of the many mysteries and glories of LADY TERMINATOR, a film that keeps on giving, a film whose greatest mystery may just be that, despite being designed as an eminently disposable rip-off, it has endured as not just one of the most enjoyable action films of its era but a truly astonishing, singular film, one that will bring more joy to your life than you could imagine any film involving multiple castration scenes possibly could.
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