Dangerous Seductress

REVIEW
Lightning doesn’t exactly strike twice with Dangerous Seductress, Indonesian director Jalil Jackson’s 1992 follow-up to his thematically similar 1988 exploitation classic Lady Terminator, but this later film is still outrageous fun if taken on its own terms and not compared with its predecessor. Much like Lady T., Dangerous Seductress revolves around a beautiful, innocent young woman possessed by a demonic spirit that forces her to go out on the prowl for blood. In Seductress, the spirit is that of a centuries-old witch inadvertently revived by an abused wife staying with her fashion model sister in Bali; possessed by the witch, Suzy then combs Jakarta nightclubs in search of male prey to dispatch with high heels and harpoon guns.

Seductress is (almost) as endearingly cheesy and disorienting as Lady T., but — from the standpoint of an international exploitation cinema devotee — the film suffers from the efforts adopted by Jackson and his producers to appeal to a wider international, and specifically American, audience. Whereas Jackson’s earlier film was a specifically South Asian revision of The Terminator, using the authentic Queen of the South Sea legend as the source of its reinterpretation, Dangerous Seductress — from its (obviously faked) L.A.-set opening sequences, to Jackson’s Anglicized credit as “John Miller” — is an attempt to emulate an American action film in style as well as content, and unfortunately, the film winds up feeling not too different from a grade-B, direct-to-cable-TV genre film of the day.

The film’s comparatively generic and anonymous tone is further underscored by Jackson’s more conservative approach to sex (of which there is little) and violence (of which there is plenty, but not to the same excessive degree as the mayhem present in Lady T.), which seems anemic in contrast to the outrageous quantities in his earlier film. Still, Dangerous Seductress remains a largely entertaining endeavor, with enough wild special effects, delirious action setpieces, and head-shakingly awful dialogue to keep most genre film fans amused for its brisk ninety-four minute running time.