Ms .45 (1981)

Zoe Lund (who was only 17 at the time of filming) plays Thana a mute woman who works in the garment district of NYC. When going home one day she's viciously raped. She stumbles home and finds a burglar in her apartment. He also rapes her but she kills him. She then gets his gun and goes out at night and kills all the men who try to attack her or other women. Then she starts killing men who have done nothing wrong.Dark and depressing film. Filmed in the early 1980s on location in NYC it presents a very negative view of the city and its citizens. All the men are portrayed as scum that deserve what they get. Surprisingly this was written and directed by two men! It's tough stuff but you have to applaud a movie that doesn't hold back. Lund is terrific in her role (hard to believe she was only 17) and it's very well-directed by Abel Ferrara. LOVE how he stages the scene when Thana is stalked by four men in Central Park. There's actually not a lot of violence in the movie but what's there is pretty strong. This was not a big hit when it came out. It was too dark for most viewers. However it did well on the midnight movie circuit. It basically just disappeared (cable TV stations won't touch it) until it was reissued in a beautiful transfer on DVD a few years back. Dark and gritty but important.

Ms. 45 (1981): Dir: Abel Ferrara / Cast: Zoe Tamerlis Lund, Editta Sherman, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, S. Edward Singer: Gripping and tense thriller about identity. The beautiful Zoe Tamerlis Lund plays a mute seamstress named Thana who is raped twice within the first ten minutes of the film. She kills her second attacker in her apartment with an iron. She then proceeds to butcher the body in her bathtub, which she distributes in shopping bags throughout the city. She seizes the pistol from her second attacker and goes from a paranoid victim to a full on man hunter, stalking the streets at night, dressed to seduce and cutting loose on any males who possess an abusive nature, including a well crafted scene where she is encircled by a gang. Director Abel Ferrara improves greatly after the horrible Driller Killer. He makes great use of New York locations as well as deliver a rousing climax at a Halloween party. Questions arise as to where all the bullets are coming from, and perhaps more on the police investigation would have added. Lund is exquisitely stunning going from violated to vigilante. Appealing supporting work from Albert Sinkys as Thana's boss, Editta Sherman as her nosy senile landlady, Darlene Stuto as the outspoken profane co-worker, and S. Edward Singer as a sleazy photographer. Chilling view of crimes that target women who have no voice to speak out until the crime is turned upon itself. Score: 9 / 10

This goes straight in my list of great cult items. The good news is that it's not just great exploitation, it's an intriguing little thing in general. It's all about sensuality of course. The famous poster announces as much upfront. A mute young girl is raped, in one of those mad exploitive strokes twice the same day, freaks out and goes on a killing spree around New York. But the whole thing has less to do with Death Wish with its implacable morality and more with something like Taxi Driver or Carrie, situated closer to the eye than the world.The metaphor used to convey this, a wonderful one, seen in the opening scene where she models a dress for a buyer, is that when she moves the material seems to flow around her. So we are tethered to her as she moves through the world, ripping the seams. Things flow around her, mostly lusting men. A street hoodlum chases her. A photographer invites her to his studio for pictures. A Saudi oil sheik picks her up in a limo. In a bizarre scene, she executes four or five gangbangers one of whom has nunchucks! Her boss is really kind with her but he obviously wants more.It's all a bit unreal seen through her eyes, many hazy shots and fades. And it's all kept in a simple comic-book style, not as we know the term now but as it was meant before the movie craze and big dumb stuff like Tomb Raider, a quick sketch.The climax is astonishingly effective; it happens in a Halloween party so we can have this unusual fabric of disguised men and charged atmosphere, herself dressed as a sexy nun and just tears everything, slowing the time into epileptic strobe, heightening images, the most startling of those being a man dressed as a bride who as she kills, the veil and wig fall of his head and hang on a door, severing as it were the purer image from the taint.Ferrara would extend a few of these notions in his more ambitious Blackout, but this is probably better.

I saw this last night and found it very interesting. But surprisingly, I wasn't very disturbed by it. I've pretty much become desensitized to these kinds of films since I've seen so many. So, looking at it from a filmmaking point of view, I found it visually bland for the most part, even for a low-budget film. Then again, I watched it on youtube. Now that I think about it, though, the sheer rawness of the whole thing actually suited the film better than if it were more visually imaginative, as this is primarily a rape and revenge film. How much more visually appealing can you make it? One of the things I really admired about the film was how dark and perverse it was, and how it leads you through the dark underbelly of New York City. Thana gets harassed left and right and finally decides to fight back, but she goes too far by killing innocent people and even causing one to kill himself. After being sexually assaulted multiple times, it does permanent psychological damage to her, and she essentially kills because she fears she may be raped again. In a way, she reminded me of a female Travis Bickle, as Travis violently lashed out against society because of what he saw and experienced in his community. The ending is bitter irony, as Thana is killed by a female, and one of her personal friends at that. Throughout the film, she had been targeting only males, as they are the ones who harassed her. After she's stabbed in the back literally, she also talks for the very first time in the film, saying her friend's name as she falls to her death.The final sequence where Thana is dressed in a nun costume and guns down several people at a club is one of the film's most haunting moments. But really, all the kills in the film are memorable, and unappealing at that. Thana isn't glorified and neither are her actions.