Ms. 45

Starring:Wayne Caro, Scott Covert, Vincent Gruppi, Alex Jachino, Jayne Kennedy, ZoÃ« Lund, Helen McGara, Karen O'Shea, Faith Peters, Editta Sherman, S. Edward Singer, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto, Jack Thibeau, Stanley Timms, Mariana Tripaldi, Peter Yellen, Nike Zachmanoglou, Lawrence Zavaglia
Studio: Image Entertainment
Product Type: DVD

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com
Abel Ferrara, the bad boy of American independent filmmaking, made his first splash with this violent twist on Death Wish and the revenge-vigilante genre. Nastassja Kinski look-alike ZoÃ« Tamerlis Lund stars as a beautiful mute seamstress in New York's garment district, a shrinking violet who is brutally raped and assaulted not once but twice in the same day. After dispatching the second predator in an adrenaline-driven rush of panic, she pockets his handgun and disposes of the body in small chunks. Tamerlis makes the most of her wordless role, her wide-eyed vulnerability hardening to a dead-eyed determination as she transforms from quivering victim to avenging dark angel, a one-woman vigilante force hunting pimps, perverts, sickos, and slimeballs and using herself as bait. Consider this Ferrara's Taxi Driver, a very different portrait of New York's mean streets. Though this shot-on-the-cheap production occasionally suffers from amateurish performances in supporting roles, Ferrara's impeccable eye for composition and bravura sense of editing create momentum that carries it through to its memorable Halloween party finale. Tamerlis is decked out in a nun's habit with a slash of lipstick across her face, a handgun tucked in a garter, and a contract out on the entire male sex. It's a deliriously effective exploitation thriller that undercuts every expectation of the genre. Ferrara makes a cameo as the first attacker. Tamerlis later cowrote and costarred in Ferrara's most notorious production, Bad Lieutenant. --Sean Axmaker
Description
A young, voluptuous New York City woman is intensely shy and unable to speak. Her naive beauty provokes the aggressive attention of all men. One evening while walking home, she is assaulted at gunpoint and brutally raped by two thugs. Her enormous fears, which had driven her inward before, now push her to an outward course of action. After killing one of her assailants, she cuts his body into pieces and disposes of the parts, one by one, at various spots in Manhattan. She carries her dead assailant's .45 automatic, initially for protection, but ultimately for unrelenting revenge against all males. Men, keep your legs crossed for this frightfully erotic thriller that delves into the life of a nubile young maiden out for blood.

Ms. 45
Average customer rating:

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

It Will Never Happen Again

A Feminist Taxi Driver

Best B-movie of the 1980s.

The original Kill Bill (...well, sort of...) ?

Ms. 45
Starring: Wayne Caro , Scott Covert , Vincent Gruppi , Alex Jachino , and Jayne Kennedy
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Crime | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video
General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video
Blackmail, Murder & Mayhem | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video
Suspense | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video
General | Crime | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video
General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video
Action & Adventure | Cult Movies | Genres | DVD | Video
Kennedy, Jayne | ( K ) | Actors & Actresses | Stores | DVD | Video
Ferrara, Abel | ( F ) | Directors | Stores | DVD | Video
( M ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
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ASIN: B00004S89Y
Release Date: 2000-04-25

Amazon.com

Abel Ferrara, the bad boy of American independent filmmaking, made his first splash with this violent twist on Death Wish and the revenge-vigilante genre. Nastassja Kinski look-alike Zoë Tamerlis Lund stars as a beautiful mute seamstress in New York's garment district, a shrinking violet who is brutally raped and assaulted not once but twice in the same day. After dispatching the second predator in an adrenaline-driven rush of panic, she pockets his handgun and disposes of the body in small chunks. Tamerlis makes the most of her wordless role, her wide-eyed vulnerability hardening to a dead-eyed determination as she transforms from quivering victim to avenging dark angel, a one-woman vigilante force hunting pimps, perverts, sickos, and slimeballs and using herself as bait. Consider this Ferrara's Taxi Driver, a very different portrait of New York's mean streets. Though this shot-on-the-cheap production occasionally suffers from amateurish performances in supporting roles, Ferrara's impeccable eye for composition and bravura sense of editing create momentum that carries it through to its memorable Halloween party finale. Tamerlis is decked out in a nun's habit with a slash of lipstick across her face, a handgun tucked in a garter, and a contract out on the entire male sex. It's a deliriously effective exploitation thriller that undercuts every expectation of the genre. Ferrara makes a cameo as the first attacker. Tamerlis later cowrote and costarred in Ferrara's most notorious production, Bad Lieutenant. --Sean Axmaker

Description

A young, voluptuous New York City woman is intensely shy and unable to speak. Her naive beauty provokes the aggressive attention of all men. One evening while walking home, she is assaulted at gunpoint and brutally raped by two thugs. Her enormous fears, which had driven her inward before, now push her to an outward course of action. After killing one of her assailants, she cuts his body into pieces and disposes of the parts, one by one, at various spots in Manhattan. She carries her dead assailant's .45 automatic, initially for protection, but ultimately for unrelenting revenge against all males. Men, keep your legs crossed for this frightfully erotic thriller that delves into the life of a nubile young maiden out for blood.

Customer Reviews:

"But the gun was put in a woman's hand...".......2006-08-22

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."

It Will Never Happen Again.......2005-03-09

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.

A Feminist Taxi Driver.......2005-01-22

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."

Best B-movie of the 1980s........2004-10-20

Pay no heed to some of the desciptions of this film as being graphic or unreasonably exploitive. This film is actually,at least in the context of Taxi Driver,a deceptively witty stab at cinematic misogyny that was almost inescapable throughout the very peculiar 1980s. The photography and editing are superb indicating ferrara as a major talent. Unfortunately his work,much like Scorsese's, does tend to be somewhat digested incorrectly by the more meat-headed of movie lovers I could see this DVD sitting on a shelf , unfortunately I might add,next to something along the lines of The Usual Suspects or blecht!Fight club.However the lead's hypnotic almost silent film performance along with the film's hip downtown New York score will keep this one from ever going stale.

The original Kill Bill (...well, sort of...) ?.......2004-07-16

Take the swordplay out of "Kill Bill" and add a heaping cup of creepiness and you've got Ms.45: a helluva flick about a woman done wrong --REALLY WRONG-- who gets so much revenge you'll be afraid to look almost any female in the eye. This is not a film about a relationship (as "Kill Bill" was) but rather a hardcore film about lonely vengeance. It a slowly maddening spiral into the private hell of the ultimate victim. On one hand it will leave you cheering for her (feels so good to see male sex monsters get what's coming to them) and on the other hand you will be left screaming innocent men to run for their frickin' lives! This is a great flick. The perfect female "Death Wish". It was captivating from start to finish. Sexy, disturbing, and wild-eyed. The fact that it is dripping with 70's styles and sounds and ambience just made it all the more surreal to me. If you want a simple movie with a deep complex terror that will leave it's mark right between your eyes, you gotta see "Ms.45"!

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