Lady Terror was written by Nick Levy and Simon Salamon. It was directed by Nathan Hill. It is an erotic thriller about a lawyer named Jake Large, depicted by Nathan Hill, who rescues a woman named Candice Knight, portrayed by Phillyda Murphy, from being robbed. The two become entangled with one another, but all is not what it seems.

The performances are inconsistent. I don’t mean there are good performances and bad performances. I mean most of the performances dance between being decent and being underwhelming. There are one or two that are solid from start to finish, and there are one or two that are outright bad from beginning to end. Most of the characters are one-dimensional except for Jake Large. Jake Large is smart, kind, and good while also being dumb, mean, and bad. Through one lens you can say this makes him a complex character. Through another, you can say this makes him a mess of contradictions. The music wants you to feel for and root for him, so I’m more in the camp that he is a mess of contradictions as there seems to be a distinct lack of self-awareness. I do not consider Jake Large a character worth rooting for or empathizing with. The character relationships are all simple. The dialogue works well enough most of the time, but other times it struggles.

Lady Terror is short, but the story still manages to fizzle out well before it should have. It is not suspenseful at all. It is not thrilling at all. The mystery isn’t hard to figure out given how derivative everything is. If you wound up having any emotional investment toward this story or these characters I would be surprised. It does eroticism pretty well until it doesn’t. There is one scene I thought was funny due to an actor’s over-the-top performance, but I don’t think it was intentional because everything else is played straight. The story may confuse. The miscarriage is entirely unnecessary to anything that happens. It has no physical, psychological, or emotional ramification on anyone, and no one questions this or the pregnancy in general. The lighting isn’t great. It mirrors the look of a home movie. There are a few scenes that would otherwise be interesting or pleasant to look at. There are some cuts in the editing I would describe as “awkward,” as well as takes that clearly should have been discarded. Some of the music is listenable, and the rest is rather forgettable. The quality of the audio varies both from scene to scene and from source to source. I would hear footsteps that sounded great followed by dialogue that sounded poor by comparison. There is no nudity, but there is sexually suggestive content. The special effects are on par with Birdemic, but they are rare.

I cannot make the argument that Lady Terror is good. I would lose that argument every single time. I can argue there are worse, lazier, and more controversial films out there. This may be the most inconsistent film I’ve seen in the last decade, but inconsistent means some things are competent sometimes. Lady Terror might have even been fun if it was more ambitious and not following a well-worn formula to the T.