Movie Details
| Title: | Ms .45 | |
| Director: | Abel Ferrara | |
| Year: | 1981 | |
| Genre: | Vigilante | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 11.15.25 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (2)
- The Addiction
- The Driller Killer
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 11.15.25 | Internet | This Screening is part of event: DVRfest 2025 This is Abel Ferrara's follow up to driller-killer and I think what got him some acclaim? Put him on the map? It's about a mute girl who has very bad luck one day coming home from her job where she's raped at gunpoint by a masked stranger then returns home to find a home invader where she's raped at gunpoint again. She gets the second guy's gun and shoots him, then, trying to figure out what to do with the body, hacks him to pieces and keeps him in garbage bags in the fridge until she can drop them off in random NYC trash bins one at a time (gotta avoid the nosy neighbor don't you know). After that, she starts shooting dudes who I think she decides are creeps? So it's somewhere between a a revenge movie and a vigilante movie and a rampage movie with a dash of They Call Her One Eye. I'm tagging this as Vigilante because it looks like a lot was taken from Death Wish but it's not an exact fit. I can see how this movie has a following. The lead, Zoe Lund, is in my mind a model that Abel Ferrara found somewhere and convinced to be in his movie. She's got a striking look and is photographed adoringly but doesn't have any lines for perhaps conspicuous reasons, so she's basically there to look pretty and strike these poses which she does very well. Her red lipstick and especially her nun outfit with the stockings where she's Travis Bickle-ing in the mirror, with the gun in her garter, feel iconic. It's probably better that she doesn't speak. There are also some touches of humor too though. Thana trying to walk the neighbor's body-sniffing dog into traffic and pointing her gun at it made me chuckle (dark humor for sure). A couple random conversations were hilarious like the guy who changed his mind about getting a vasectomy. The parts that don't work for me, as usual, are the logic bits. I don't know if the movie is clear enough about why these guys are targeted. Some of them, sure, I see that she sees that they're bad guys but one dude was just kissing his girlfriend? Maybe it's general trauma around any sort of affection? Unclear. By the end she seems like she's shooting random dudes with a seemingly limitless supply of bullets. But it's not that kind of movie. I think at the end of the day Ferrara made a grindhouse movie with a hot girl shooting people that's better than it should be. |
