"...Deadlier than the Male"
A beautiful young woman is sexually assaulted on her way home from her job in New York's garment district. He wears a mask, puts a gun in her face and tells her he'll shoot if she makes a sound. She drags herself home afterwards only to find a burglar ransacking her home. Taking her for an easy target, and not finding any easy cash, he too begins to assault the poor girl. Her name is Thana and ironically she is mute, the only sound she makes is with the business end of the .45 caliber pistol that she soon uses on any man she lures into her violent web of revenge and obsession in cult director Abel Ferrara's gritty street level tale of deadly Miss out for misandry and murder.
Ms. 45 is almost a female retelling of the anti-hero mythos, one that crosses society taboos and laws into vigilantism and psychopathic behavior with a feminine wile. Ferrara's grounding of the world in 80s New York is as solid here as in his other, more well known film Bad Lieutenant (1992). The city in these films is a character unto itself, completely alive in it's own place and time. His ability to build tension and produce entertainment while maintaining quality on an independant budget is astonishing, as is his star Zoe Lund's exceptionally beautiful, cold personification of feminine wrath. She goes through a transformation from mousy mute virgin to stone cold man-murdering black widow without an eyelash out of place. She just wants to be left alone,and apparently the only way she can do that is by murdering the entire male population of New York City
On paper, Ms.45 sounds like just another of the era's "video nasties," an exploitative WHAM-BAM- "DON'T KILL ME"-MA'AM shooter for those male film geeks salivating for more I Spit On Your Grave's sadomasochistic pleasures. It has a thread bare story with one gimmick and no plot turns, gritty locations and weak side stories (like the one about a nosy landlady and Phil her dog who are both iffy actors). Yet it thrives because of Zoe Lund's unreadable eyes can seem to mask a palpable pain afloat in a lake of ice cold revenge, turning the film into a horror story of a woman wronged by an entire gender who better watch out. The violence she perpetrates is less explicit on screen than the double rape that "created" her, allowing for forgiveness of her crimes that, combined with her beauty and grace, generate a remarkable anti-hero cum psychopath with real pathos and considerable pull into cult status. Despite her own overcompensating quest for vengeance (lots of innocent men suffer her wrath), she is never reviled or scorned, neither on or off the screen. She is both pitied and cheered by those watching, and as a result the femsploitation genre gets delightfully turned on its ear. In the 70s if Pam Grier shot some dudes in cold blood it was ok because she was nude for most of the film and no ones going to complain, and they were usually rapey drug dealers or something. Ferrara used that same cinema-bait as a starting point, but keeps Thana clothed like an unattainable supermodel in a fashion advertisement, cold and aloof behind a wall of unrequited rage. As her wrath grows so does her skirt's hem length, subverting the usual primal drives of exploitation cinema to empower female characters and audience members alike.
Culminating in a slow motion fueled bullet ridden Halloween party with Thana armed as a slutty Nun (mmm, symbolism!), Ms. 45 ends with a BANG, a whisper and a well deserved reputation for entertainment with a bullet.
Culminating in a slow motion fueled bullet ridden Halloween party with Thana armed as a slutty Nun (mmm, symbolism!), Ms. 45 ends with a BANG, a whisper and a well deserved reputation for entertainment with a bullet.
8 Don't Eat Her Sausage Phil! out of 10 (GREAT)
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