Terminator Woman (1992)
- adamsoverduereview
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
This week’s pick for the Fridays of Fury Action Club wasn’t very good, but at least it's not Soldier Terminators (although I doubt many movies could limbo under a bar set that low). This is a low-budget, low-ambition actioner designed to stock the shelves of 90s video stores. That’s what I expected going in, but I did have a little hope that it might surpass that because it stars Karen Sheperd. Sheperd is an actor/martial artist/stunt performer who mostly worked in B-movies and TV (she doubled for Eliza Dushku on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Nia Peeples on Walker Texas Ranger!). I know her from the absolute banger of a fight she had with Cynthia Rothrock in the Hong Kong classic Righting Wrongs (aka Above the Law). So this could have been a hidden gem where she got to strut her stuff… not so much.
The plot is some nonsense about gold and slavers that takes two American cops to Africa in pursuit of a bad guy played by Michel Qissi (also the director). At one point they mention the “biggest slavery ring” in Africa that took NINE whole victims this month! At that rate it would take a year to fill a shipping crate/eighteen wheeler’s worth of victims for the Transporter to lose track of. Sorry, I rewatched The Transporter recently and confirmed my decades old memory that the protagonist and the movie completely forget about a literal truckload of trafficked people at the end (not even an ADR line from the cops of “Oh we stopped that second truck at a roadblock” or anything!).
To this movie’s credit, despite Sheperd’s character Julie having to split hero duties with ostensible lead Jay (Jerry Trimble), she still gets a decent amount of action and screen time. Not to the movie’s credit, she still has to be the one to get knocked out and captured by the bad guys. Which then results in her spending most of the movie in her bejeweled club top and push-up bra. The intended sex appeal is somewhat reduced by the unflattering haircut Sheperd is afflicted with.
Because this movie is based more on tropes and memories of other movies than any recognizable human interactions, we get some old cliches executed in amusingly awkward ways, like the “obvious trap seduction.” Julie convinces one of her captors to get close enough to grope her leading to this exchange:
“Your legs are so strong…”
“I work at it… My arms are strong too…”
He moves in closer (to grope her arms?) and gets nut punched.
Julie commits a lot of groin assaults throughout the movie, including a jumping double-dick-kick that probably would have been pretty cool if the directing/editing didn’t flub it.
I have to be honest here, I found leading man Trimble extremely unappealing in this movie. And I don’t have to be mean here, but I will… on a visceral level I found his voice, his hair, and his face unpleasant to listen to/look at. Later Trimble lost that haircut and aged into his facial features and he got a good look going, but my note for this movie described him as “if Michael Rapaport took steroids to play a Karate Kid villain.” Trimble does have some sweet moves, though (those kicks!), which was obviously a bigger factor in getting this role than charisma or acting ability. He also isn’t done any favors by the script, as his character comes off as a douchebag from the second he pulls the “oops I only booked one hotel room with one bed” on his partner Julie and never improves from there. A very young local kid offers to be a paid guide, and Jay ends up using him for his international criminal investigation and gets the kid’s sister/guardian killed! Don’t worry though, Jay gives the kid a whole thousand dollars at the end to make up for losing the only person who cared for him.
I got a big laugh at the scene where Jay returns to his hotel room after Julie has been kidnapped. A distressed Jay thinks about Julie while he stretch-humps the wall, then he does hotel karate. All in jeans.
Our “hero” Jay ends up being so useless that Julie spends most of the movie saving herself and another woman. They escape their captors and wander through the woods. They seem to be wandering for days, as we cut back and forth with multiple scenes of Jay going out to “investigate,” achieving absolutely nothing, and going back to do his nightly hotel karate. At one point, Julie and the other woman are resting in the woods and have a conversation about their (oddly close) backgrounds, that’s nice. Then they start talking about how they both want Jay (who the other woman literally met for 5 seconds?) and how great he is and I wanted to smack my TV. It was like the filmmakers suddenly realized they had accidentally passed the Bechdel Test, and backpedaled to having the women fawn over the useless douchebag dude.
There is also a blonde femme fatale running around. She is banging a high level cop, which means guards are cool just letting her wander around the police station jail? She also tries to seduce Jay, thankfully she fails and we are spared a Trimble sex scene. Eventually she gets to have a showdown with Julie in a boat while Trimble fights Qissi in a cave. My notes also say “terrible music,” I can’t remember if that was just the climax or throughout the whole movie. Anyway, the day is saved, the white people smile, and that local kid’s sister is still fucking dead. The end.
There is some nostalgic appeal to this schlock, the kind of movie I would have watched on cable at 8 years old just because it had punching. The script built from tropes and cliches, the action frequent but unmemorable. But tastes change and refine, and sometimes junk food you loved as a kid just isn’t as tasty. Had this not been an Action Club pick, it would have been something I would probably only put on if I was half-asleep and didn’t want to commit to something good. It's a shame Karen Sheperd didn’t get a better starring vehicle. Outside of the novelty of seeing her, there isn’t really anything to distinguish this from the rest of the VHS pile.
Read the rest of the Club’s reviews here
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