TEMPLE OF SCHLOCK: Movie Ad of the Week: LADY TERMINATOR (1989)

Sunday, September 18, 2011

Movie Ad of the Week: LADY TERMINATOR (1989)

This blood-soaked Indonesian knockoff of you-know-what blasted across 27 tri-state screens on June 9th, 1989 and sent out-of-town fanzine editors like yours truly scrambling to find Times Square correspondents to write it up (Roger Corman's water-logged cheapie LORDS OF THE DEEP opened the same day in many of the same venues, beating another James Cameron film to the punch by 2 months). SONNY BOY hit town a year later, but we consider Lady T. and her vagina serpens-dentata the last pure exploitation import to make a surprise appearance in the Big Apple.

5 comments:

Nick Cato said...: LADY TERMINATOR was the last genuine grindhouse film I got to see in times Square. There was a 35mm screening of it last Friday in NYC at 92 Tribeca.; 9/19/2011 08:12:00 PM
Temple of Schlock said...: Did you see it at the Criterion? I know the Harris ran it with DIE HARD as the second feature. We found someone on Long Island to review it (and LORDS OF THE DEEP) at the Patchogue 13.; 9/19/2011 10:33:00 PM
Nick Cato said...: I'm pretty sure it was at the Harris, although I didn't stay for Die Hard (and I must be getting old as I can't even remember them playing together!).; 9/21/2011 07:39:00 PM
Mike Mac said...: I wish I'd had a chance to see Lady Terminator in a theater! I own the DVD, but haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

Your reference to "the last pure exploitation import to make a surprise appearance in the Big Apple" made me think of what the last such movie to show up at a theater here in Indianapolis. At first I thought that Murder Rock (complete with misleading new title, The Demon Is Loose, and similarly misleading ad art) was the winner. It showed up in Evansville, IN, back in April or May of 1990. Thanks to the newspaper room at the Central Library in Indy, I was keeping up with what was playing in theaters elsewhere around the country, so I knew about TDIL in Evansville, and drove down to see it the second weekend it was there. Since the ad in the paper had no credits for cast or crew, I knew virtually nothing about it before I made the drive, beyond a brief listing in the Evansville paper that said that one "Claude (or Claudio) Cassinel" was in the cast. My jaw nearly hit the floor when I saw Lucio Fulci credited as director in the opening credits. A few months later, TDIL opened here in Indy, and I saw it again.

Now that I think of it, though, maybe Blood Warriors would be "the last pure exploitation import" to hit Indy theaters- if it was truly an import at all. Oddly enough, it- like Lady Terminator- has an Indonesian connection, but Sam Firstenberg directed BW, and the IMDb lists it as a US/Indonesian co-production... so maybe it wouldn't count as an import.

Interesting that you also should mention Sonny Boy in this context. I tend to think of that one as a sort of "end of an era" movie as well: Frankenstein Island, with John Carradine, was the first real low-budget schlock movie I saw in a theater- and Sonny Boy, with David Carradine, seemed like sort of a bookend to that period (even though a few isolated things like Blood Warriors made it to theaters here after SB did). And to add in another coincidence: Frankenstein Island showed up at three or four area theaters the Wednesday before Thanksgiving in 1981; I saw it in the same place- the now-gone Glendale IV-V-VI- in which I would see Blood Warriors over a decade later.; 9/23/2011 04:55:00 PM
Lew said...: I had the first ever interview with star Barbara Anne Constable on my old blog, DamnThatOjeda:
http://damnthatojeda.wordpress.com/2010/06/23/lady-terminator-speaks-the-first-ever-interview-with-barbara-anne-constable/

Also, we do have a Facebook page called the Lady Terminator Appreciation Society, started up by Gary Otto.; 10/22/2011 11:13:00 AM