A+ | Fantastic Crap Comics

LADY TERMINATOR ~ 1989, H. Tjut Djalil, Indonesia

lady_terminator_poster

The psychotronic landscape is littered with examples of bizarre and shoddy, foreign rip offs of popular Western properties. Often, these are done with cunning exploitation of loopholes and/or blatant disregard for copyright laws (Turkey is king in this arena). Many of these bizarro world doppelgangers are often great for a chuckle, but almost none of these movies can ever hold a candle to the film they imitate … Indonesia’s Lady Terminator is one shinning exception. Wow. This movie out-Terminators The Terminator over and over.

Glorious though it may be, though, underneath all the righteous splendor and gunfire, Lady Terminator IS a cheap knock off, albeit with a bit of local Indonesian flavor to spice things up and smooth things out. Let’s have a fun little look at how these two films are similar, and how they differ:

Our Terminator is a lady: First, most obvious difference, there’s no Indonesian Arnold in this flick. For our menacing murder delivery system, Lady Terminator has traded a teetering Austrian muscle man for an attractive white girl sporting regrettable 80’s frizz hair. This may have been done for the sole purpose of guaranteeing female nude scenes, but ever changing Indonesian censorship laws would force distributors to draw cartoon lightning over her grown up parts off and on as years went by, leaving the Lady Terminator with Laser boobs on some prints of the movie. The DVD release of this film by Mondo Macabro has an interesting feature on the film which explains this phenomena. Behold; Laser Bra: The laser versions of the movie are automatically pretty funny for this reason, and I wish that there existed a version of The Terminator where Arnold has laser wang. Actually, by now there probably is, thank you Internet.
No robots, no time travel: The second biggest deviation from James Cameron’s 1984 film is that all the time travel and robots from the future are completely left out altogether, for reasons I am not privy to. Any attempt to explain this would be based solely on speculation (probably budget). Instead, this film involves magic… from the past! Some dude angers an evil witch, and she in turn curses his lineage, as witches are wont to do, claiming that at some point a descendant of his will become a terminator, or get stalked and terminated by a terminator, or something… Something terminator related will go down, is what the witch says. That’s what basically happens.
Snake: As everyone knows, the area in which Cameron’s The Terminator was most lacking was in it’s failure to feature a weird, weasel looking solider of fortune type guy with a blonde mullet named Snake. Fret not, Lady Terminator has you covered here, and he is spectacular.

Anyway, the film’s basic skeleton unravels pretty closely to the original. Lady Terminator wants to kill some girl, some guy opts to help her survive, there is a disco shoot out, Snake get’s involved, and a lot of people get blown away. A LOT of people. Lady Terminator is VIOLENT…. Cartoonishly, awesomely so. The body count leaves the original Terminator in the dust, and as a matter of fact, SOMEHOW, this movie has a better “person digs out their own eyeball in a bathroom sink” effect than the real Terminator. Explain THAT to me.

Yeah, the move is super crappy, but I remind you that this is an Indonesian rip off of The Terminator that we’re talking about. I love Lady Terminator, and it deserves a lot of praise for managing to match The Terminator where it needs to and smoke it where it wants to.

snake 4

A+

Abominable~ 2006, Ryan Schifrin, USA

As it stands, Abominable is the single best sasquatch movie ever made. This is the one to beat. It’s no small feat (no small feet!? Hilarious!), either, many quality films have come before, be they your family friendly Harry and the Hendersons, your spine tingling speculative documentaries like Legend of Boggy Creek, or your crowd pleasing horror romps like Shriek of the Mutilated or Night of the Demon, but of all these, Abominable is the one ring to rule them all. How can this be? Well, the first key to Abominable’s success is that it has gore and naked people. Even with glorious titan of entertainment John Lithgow slam dunking that mother like a champ, Harry And The Hendersons simply cannot compete with Abominable in this regard. Secondly, Abominable rips off Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Rear Window with apparently no remorse of any kind. The plot is damn near identical, a wheel chair bound man witnesses something terrible and tries frantically to warn those around him, but his claims are dismissed and thus he must race against time to prove himself before it’s too late. Now, in Rear Window we had Jimmy Stewart trying to convince people that Raymond Burr had murdered his wife. In Abominable, we have Police Academy 5: Assignment: Miami Beach star Matt McCoy trying to convince a house full of college girls that a Sasquatch is trying to eat them. Knowing that director Ryan Schifrin must have watched Rear Window and recognized the potential of remaking the film with the inclusion of a sasquatch and a house full of college girls is pretty awesome. In Hitchcock’s defense, there was virtually no way for him to have known how desperately Rear Window needed a Bigfoot type monster in it, no matter how glaringly apparent it is to us today. You see, Rear Window was released in 1954, a full four years before the term “bigfoot” was coined in 1958, and a full 13 years before the Patterson Film raised sasquatch public awareness and made him a household name. In other words, at the time of Rear Window’s release, Alfred Hitchcock may not have even known what a sasquatch was. Doubtless, he knew his film was missing some crucial component, though, and when he did see the Patterson footage years later there is no question in my mind that he was immediately hit with the realization that this is what his film so badly needed. I’m sure this shortcoming haunted him for the rest of his days, but happily we can now see that his suffering is at an end, because Ryan Schifrin has succeeded where Alfred Hitchcock could not, he has brought us the movie we’ve needed without knowing for over 50 years. Now we can all sleep easy knowing that future generations will never again have to settle for the inferior bigfootless 1954 version, now we have Abominable. Finally we are able to enjoy Hitchcock’s vision as it was always meant to be seen; a Sasquatch stomping about violently, the screams of young women echoing through the forest in utter futility as they are one by one dismembered for no apparent reason at all, and all of this transpiring before the wide, horrified eyes of Matt McCoy, himself nearly powerless to bring this bloody rampage to an end. Rarely can we see examples of films which bring this much wanted closure to our pained, desperate zeitgeist, but Abominable is that one special film out of a million. I mean, no disrespect to Jimmy Stewart, he’s one of my favorite actors ever, but go watch Jaws without the shark and let me know what you thought of it. Also, the sasquatch in this movie kinda looks like Luis Guzmán, which is clearly also a plus.

squatch guzman Seeing double?!

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by Christopher Ochs

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LADY TERMINATOR!!!!

Abominable!