Monday, April 08, 2013

Love in a Forest of Ferns

Lady Terminator (1989)
directed by H. Tjut Djalil
rating: 3 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix

There's a moment at the end of Lady Terminator when a cop from New York City throws himself between his pal and the eponymous gun-toting beauty. Like many other men throughout the course of the movie, the cop from New York City dies. But this man is special; he was close, like a brother. So how does his best friend say goodbye? He looks at the corpse on the ground and says, "I owe you one."

Not in this life! But in Rudy Wurlitzer's Valhalla, old amigos meet and die again and again, each time with a little more panache, arms like cooked pasta, and stuffed to the gills with fat squibs. There are so many enthusiastic deaths in Lady Terminator, most of them anonymous (even the stars aren't credited on the IMDb page). But in 1989 Indonesia, I'd pick death by Barbara Anne Constable, and so would you. And so did they, brave warriors.

The plot is The Terminator by way of working-class South Pacific exoticism, and the cyborg manifestation of a "South Sea Queen" is never justified or explained by the terms of the curse she casts. Except for Constable, Christopher J. Hart, and Hart's two wingmen - who go by the names of Snake and Tubb - the entire cast is Indonesian. Snake only says things like "Fuckin' A!" and "Yeaahhh!" but with such enthusiasm that I'd like to think Kurt Russell could hear him all the way back in the US of A.

That's the same fictional universe in which Angelo Janotti from Miami Connection worked his way into the psyche of a nine-year old one-day Bust-Ass. I thought of Miami Connection for the obvious reasons, but it's okay to be obvious - and it's okay to steal James Cameron's silly story - if what you really want to do is make the best Miami Vice homage you can. We should all be so ambitious.