“That’s a charming name. Is that Greek?”
Prior to watching Ms .45, the only Abel Ferrara film I’d seen was Bad Lieutenant, and only a small portion of it at that. Early in that film, around the time that Harvey Keitel was drunkenly engaging in a threesome and strutting around with his manhood on full display, my roommate asked to watch a different movie, one that didn’t revel in filth quite so much. I conceded the television set even though I was anxious to see how depraved the film would get, if only to try to understand the auteur’s lasting appeal. I have Bad Lieutenant and King of New York on DVD, but haven’t picked either of them up since that night. My passing interest in Ferrara kind of got lost in the shuffle of life. But then I discovered TubiTV, which is probably the best streaming service in existence when taking into account both price (it’s free!) and content (it’s got tens of thousands of films from the early 1900s through present day). They have a large selection of Ferrara’s works, and I decided to start near the beginning with Ms .45 because it has an awesome poster. This was the auteur’s second feature after the self-starring The Driller Killer and third film overall (his debut was a hardcore pornography film—for what it’s worth I’ve no intention of watching that one).
As a schlocky rape-revenge thriller, the primary objective of Ms .45 (also called Angel of Vengeance) is to entertain. It handles this effortlessly. At a slick 80 minutes, Thana’s (Zoë Lund) transformation from a timid, mute seamstress into an exuberant serial killer is enjoyable for its exploitative features alone. There’s enough gloss and glamorized debauchery to relish it like any other NYC grindhouse flick. In a way, such a simplistic description fits Ms .45 quite well and its stylistic trappings are professional enough to elevate beyond the legion of similar tawdry female revenge fantasies. To be captivated by the lurid surface appeal is certainly no crime. But to do so is to dismiss the film’s self-contradictions, which are perhaps its most interesting feature.
Ms .45 follows young Thana (Lund, credited here as Zoë Tamerlis, was still a teenager when the film was made), a shy, seemingly normal woman whose life is quickly upended when she is raped twice in quick succession. As she walks home from her job in Manhattan’s fashion district, a masked thug (played by Ferrara himself) holds her at gunpoint in a secluded alley and forces himself upon her. Unable to cry out, she takes the brutal violation of her body in silence. She survives the ordeal and shuffles her way back to her apartment in shock where, as fate would have it, another assailant awaits. This second attacker proves to be an amateur rapist as he loses himself in ecstasy and drops his handgun, giving Thana a sliver of opportunity to bludgeon him in the head with an ornamental glass apple. After the initial counterattack, she finishes him off with a strike from the pointy end of her steam iron.
As Thana struggles to conceal the sub rosa transportation of her assailant’s dead body, and subsequently comes to realize that she has an appetite for blood, it is easy to eagerly follow her revenge story for the simple pleasure of watching the snapped mute girl serially murder based on whim alone. She butchers the corpse she’s been storing in her bathtub, keeps his body parts in the fridge, and gradually disposes of them when she goes out. The day after her ordeal, she tries to discreetly deposit a paper bag amidst a pile of other garbage on the side of a city street. A young man, thinking she dropped the bag, picks it up and begins to follow her. Unwisely, he continues even as she flees from him in a dead sprint. Cornered in an alley, Thana pulls out her second rapist’s .45 handgun and pops a round into her pursuer’s forehead.
The media catches wind of the mounting number of body parts found strewn about the city, her work ethic suffers, and her landlady (Editta Sherman) becomes suspicious of her uncharacteristic behavior. Although she often moves through her workday in a haze, she takes to her new life as a vigilante. She agrees to model for a fashion photographer who she then kills as soon as they find themselves alone in his studio; she takes out her anger on a pimp who is abusing one of his prostitutes; some gang members meet their end in a stylishly staged showdown; she jumps in a car with a Saudi Arabian business man and takes him and his driver out without a second thought. In a wonderfully surreal sequence, Thana sits on a bench with a troubled man who is spilling his darkest secrets to her. She tries to shoot him but her gun jams. He takes the gun from her, questions her motives, then resets the gun and takes his own life. The climax occurs when she attends a Halloween party hosted by her boss, Albert (Albert Sinkys). She dresses up as a sexy nun and interrupts the alcohol and disco by picking off the men one by one.
I’m fine walking away from Ms .45 having enjoyed it as sleazy entertainment. But it may also be worth digging into its subtext a little bit. I’m not sure how consciously Ferrara was trying to add depth to his picture, but there are moments that hint in that direction. A few exemplary small moments in particular help to flesh out the lasting effects of Thana’s harrowing encounters (outside of the fact that she becomes a serial killer, which is too fanciful to be very meaningful). At the seamstress studio, when Albert rips the half-finished garment off of a mannequin because the neck style was incorrect, Thana enters a state of shock at how carelessly he declothed the model. In another scene, she begins to underdress in the assumed safety of her bathroom, only to be groped by the phantom hand of her first rapist, who also appears in the mirror. The latter instance, especially, can be seen as an intentional disruption of the male gaze, interrupting the titillating sequence at the exact moment we would expect an exploitation film to showcase some gratuitous nudity. If we really want to pull on this thread, the masked Ferrara is a perfect stand-in for the modern voyeur who, through the use of technology, can now tickle his fancy for hours on end in a permanent state of depravity. It’s really heartbreaking, actually, to think that now, instead of having to procure a gun and corner the innocent young lady, due to advances in online communication speeds and the all-out assault on traditional moral values, scantily clad teenage girls will now invite nasty old men into their bedrooms for a $2 tip on some virtual platform or another. I mean, I’m glad that they don’t have to strip for the perverts at gunpoint, but they’re still stripping for the perverts. Would they do so if they had to look into the eyes of the braindead degenerates who wish to exploit them?
While I think these attempts to flesh out Thana’s mental state give Ms .45 the illusion of depth, elsewhere Ferrara’s approach seems inherently self-conflicted. While the male gaze is within his crosshairs, he can’t help himself from overtly sexualizing his main character. Obviously that’s part of the story, as she uses her wiles to get herself into positions to take out her targets; but he spends a lot of time lingering on her partially dressed in her bedroom, applying make-up, and posing with her pistol in front of her mirror. Then again, maybe those contradictions were intentional. It’s certainly the case that the more times we watch Thana taking revenge on targets of ambiguous guilt, our sympathies drift from her to her victims, just as we are first aligned with her plight by witnessing her rape. Her terrible experience has broken her and she no longer sees shades of grey, but a black-and-white world where every man is a monster. All of this confusing symbolism comes to a head in the gruesome climax at the Halloween party, where a man cross-dressed as a bride takes a gutshot and a woman, thrusting a cake-cutting knife positioned at crotch level, stabs Thana in the back. These subversions allow Ms .45 to avoid any simpleminded observations. Instead of a male-v-female reading, the most plausible angle to take is one that suggests all humans are prone to evil. I’m not totally sure exactly how to react to it; but suffice to say it’s quite a bit more complex and compassionate than your run-of-the-mill exploitation flick.