(Pembalasan ratu pantai selatan)
Directed by Jalil Jackson
82 minutes
In English

Maybe it's time to screen an Indonesian flick, especially since we live in Holland—former colonizer of that country. And what we have in store is a pretty wild ride.... an eclectic mix of both ancient folklore and new-world myths. The title of this movie is of course a rip-off of the Hollywood blockbuster starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, but here, the modern and the ancient come together. A female anthropologist skin-diver discovers an underwater city and becomes possessed by a sex-hungry Asian sea Goddess. Toting an AK47 machine-gun, she re-emerges as Lady Terminator to fulfill a 100 year-old curse of destruction and revenge.

What can I say? This flick is a cinematic roller-coaster ride fusing Asian black magic and ludicrous corporate Western fantasies (the Hollywood Terminator franchise), but then viewed through an almost feminist lens. After all, who wouldn't want to see a woman knock the shit out of men for a change? Yes, the film is pretty trashy, with an insane plot and sometimes terrible dialogue, but also with a bold adventurism. We know we are in for a trip with any film where the lead character suddenly carves out her own eyeball, pulls out a necklace from the hole where her eye had been, before replacing her eye back in the socket. Does that action have symbolic meaning? Hard to tell for us gringos, since we know nothing about Asian culture. Plenty of nudity and loads of camp appeal, all with an otherworldly Indonesian twist.