Ms. 45 (1981)

IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN!

MS.45 stars the VERY beautiful ZOE TAMERLIS (who looks like a young Brooke Shields BUT BETTER!) who plays a young,voluptuous New York city girl who is unfortunately raped while buying groceries in a ally way. After picking herself up and wiping the blood from her mouth she leaves for her apartment
just to find a burglar their who decides that jewelry is not the only thing he wants! Yet again our heroine is raped but this time she is able to kill her attacker(YEAH!) She cuts his body into pieces(ALA DEMENTED which came out the same year) and disposes of the parts. Now equipped with her assailants gun it is not just the scumbag from the supermarket she is after BUT all men(YIKES!) Men keep your legs crossed for this is a frightfully erotic thriller that delves into the life of a nubile young maiden out for blood. High points are the actress Zoe(who like Claudia Jennings another RAPE & REVENGE actress died to young) the fact she does not speak a word and the soundtrack is awesome. A MUST SEE!!!
NOTE: I own the IMAGE edit. which is cut by about 2 min. The 2 min are the rape scenes in the beginning but you get all the revenge scenes intact which is what these great movies are all about :) August 4, 2008

A spiral into insanity.

Though Abel Ferrara's 1981 vigilante flick 'Ms. 45' frequently gets the label of a "female Death Wish", it really is much more than that: it is, like 'The Driller Killer' before it, an elaborate tale about an individual's spiral into insanity with the pressures of life and the pain of, in this case, a dual attack of brutal sexual assaults.

The film tells the tale of mute clothing line worker Thana (played brilliantly by the late Zoë Lund) who is a little bit of a misfit at her place of work due to her inability to speak. Walking home from her job one afternoon she is snatched and dragged into an alleyway by a masked rapist (played eerily in a cameo by director Ferrera). Meanwhile, her apartment in in the process of being robbed by another man. When she gets home, the thief beats her and begins to rape her again, but she gets the best of him and ends up chopping him up and putting his remains in a city garbage can. With the robber's gun in hand, she begins her own journey of inner-city vengeance against a variety of men she views as predatory.

This is a film where one feels somewhat immoral being entertained by the revenge killings but they end up being enjoyable because we the audience can identify with her rage, however misandrious and irrational it is. Given that she was already a sort of misfit and outcast in her own world due to her mute voice, her brutal violation alienates and enrages an already isolated woman. In essence, it's entertaining to watch her spree because we can feel her pain yet soon we realize we're enjoying a mere spiral into insanity and irrationality.

'Ms. 45' is an absolute gem of a flick, a masterpiece that gets the audience to cheer on a spree of retribution that is unjustified yet from the perspective of one so damaged and alienated it's more than justified and even overdue. As such, it also works as a character study and a treatise on urban alienation and rationality of revenge and justice. A masterpiece. June 18, 2008

"But the gun was put in a woman's hand..."

When two rapists in seperate attacks on the same woman, on the same day, warn her to keep silent, the joke's on them. Thana is a mute, and couldn't scream if she wanted to. She soon finds her 'voice', however, when she fells the second attacker in her apartment and acquires his .45-caliber pistol. It's not long before you can't shut her up-- if you're a man. Thana is a femme fatale with a refreshingly direct approach.

Zoe Lund was a remarkable beauty. To cite some other reviews here, crassly: Is she a dead ringer for Nastassia Kinski, or is it Denise Richards? (Nah, maybe *they* look kinda like *her*.) Anyway, how her looks matter in this role is that she appears so stunningly fragile, a flower of innocence. Even when she's all dolled up to bait the hook, she's nearly a child playing dress-up: makeup to the hilt, soon adding avenger-superhero accents to her garb (black boots and gloves, a beret, a cloak). This young fragility also makes Thana's transformation more believable: she seems all the more easily broken and re-made. It helps that Lund (or Tamerlais, at the time) was 17 years old.

It should be made clear that this B-movie is a B-movie--low-budget, high-concept-- but within those bounds it is *not* campy. It is grim but thoughtful. It has a confrontational uncertainty over what the difference is between vengeance and justice.

It's also got mood and pace. The violence is broken up in part with the story of Thana's gradual disposal of the body parts of the second rapist, scattered around New York in Hefty bags (is she getting rid of the evidence, or sending a message?). The camera ominously lingers on wastebaskets, gutters, and bag-lady shopping carts. The editing is in fact great at holding a shot just a little longer than you expect, and the film develops deliberately and artfully. Even the most outrageously sleazy guys are given their due, and are hardly presented simply as deserving villians (the ones that aren't villians anyway-- you can decide which is which).

At the same time, of course, it's a delirious ride in how extreme the situations get. Don't expect every detail to be believable, that's not the point. It's primal and kind of mythic in a way that any decent exploitation movie should be. The minimal but very dynamic score, with lots of percussive horn blast echoes, is great-- basically horror movie music. And it's all in a perfect setting: New York city deep in its seedy era.

It's nice that some say this film has a 'cult classic' status, but it's one of those that deserves a bigger cult. It's squarely within the off-putting exploitation subgenre of rape revenge films, but it never forgets that this woman is a person, nor that this person is a woman. Zoe Lund, writing in 1993, put it like this: "Ms .45 presents a humble, yet well-crafted metaphor for rebellion of the any-sexed oppressed. But the gun was put in a woman's hand. A woman carried that universal message, and so it was all the more powerful. It made us shiver. Male and female. Different timbres and temperatures of shiver, but shiver all round." August 22, 2006

It Will Never Happen Again

I am glad "Ms. 45" is back on the shelf, because for a long time it was hard to find, certainly up here in Canada. This film is superior to "Driller Killer" in every way except for the lead track. Nothing touches the live performance of Tony Coca Cola and the Roosters playing The Grand Street Stomp. It is quite obvious in "Ms. 45" that that is not the sound of a trumpet. Anyway, for those who don't dig this, you can't tell me you can diss it. This, his second film, is night and day between "Driller Killer". What an obvious improvement. I was hoping that the DVD wouldn't be Vanilla and have at least a directors commentary. "Driller Killer's" commentray is legendary. And while you could chalk this up as being the female version of "Death Wish" there are some elements here that make it a true horror flick. For all those who liked "Eating Raoul", this is a must see. Suspension of disbelief is an obvious exercise here, but you won't be disappointed with it if this is your thing. See if you can spot Michael Richards as one of the extras at the Halloween party. March 9, 2005

A Feminist Taxi Driver

I saw Ms. 45 a few months ago and was completely blown away by it. I understand it's been edited, and I assume I saw a version that had been cut. But I can assure you that it's still worth seeing.

Thana is a mute seamstress who is sexually assaulted not once, but twice, on her way home from work. When I read the description, I thought this sounded a bit overly dramatic and far-fetched. However, the way it plays out in the film is very believable, both in the way it is portrayed, and the way it effects Thana in the rest of the film.

Thana is walking home and gets attacked and raped in an alleyway. While we can still see feel genuine sympathy for Thana as the victim, we can also see how truly pathetic the rapist is, in his desperate need to have power over another person. Zoe Tamerlis does not speak, since her character is mute, but suggests more than enough with her facial expressions. Thana is in shock, and returns home to pull herself together. Once she gets to her apartment, she sits down on her bed, and the first thing she sees on the floor is a foreign pair of boots. Another rapist has entered her apartment. She has already been violated on the street where she is vulnerable, and before she is able to recover from the initial shock, she is violated further in her apartment, her own space.

Thana manages to kill the second rapist in her home, and takes his gun with her when she goes out the next day. She disposes of his body by cutting off a piece at a time and dumping it. As the corpse gradually disappears, so does Thana's composure. She begins to use the gun to kill men, first retaliating when she feels threatened, then going out in search of them, using herself as bait.

"Ms. 45" isn't so much of a feminist revenge fantasy as it is a feminist portrait of a victim turned anti-hero. In one scene, Thana walks through a park, and a group of men encircle her with the obvious intention of gang raping her. She surprises them by turning 360 degrees and killing them one by one. However, there are a few instances in which the intentions of the men she kills are not so obvious, and she seems to be killing innocent men as well as would-be rapists. The point of this is not to say that what Thana is doing is right and just, but to show the effects of sexual assault on the female victim. Women and girls who are sexually assaulted and abused by males often feel threatened by all men. This movie illustrates how sexual assault effects how female victims view men and interact with them.

The reason why I call this a feminist film is not because it glorifies her actions of revenge, but because it follows the story of the female victim from beginning to end. In most slasher movies, we usually see one or more women who are killed for voyeuristic purposes, which many feminist film theorists consider mysoginistic. The female victim looks attractive, and keeps the audience entertained by dying a violent death before she is ever developed as an actual character. In "Ms. 45," the male attackers themselves are the ones who never become further developed, and Thana is the one we follow, the one we care about.

Zoe Tamerlis is perfect as the mute Thana. Although she never speaks, her face shows the gradual transformation from shrinking violet to femme fatale killing machine. Portraying Thana as a mute is a brilliant move on part of Abel Ferrera. Rape is the most underreported crime, and Thana's inability to speak symbolizes perfectly a sexual assault victim's inability to express what happened to her.

"Ms. 45" is considered an exploitation movie. If it is, it's the one of the finest, most real, and most sensitive exploitation movies I've ever seen. Feminist exploitation cinema, just like the Jack Hill classic, "Switchblade Sisters." January 22, 2005

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