Solidrariol
Am I Missing Something?
Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
Catangro
After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.
Neive Bellamy
Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.
trashgang
The discussion between so many horror geeks is which revenge flick started it all, the notorious I Spit On Your Grave (1978) or this less known and harder to find Ms 45 made by Abel Ferrara who just came out the cult classic Driller Killer (1979). What makes Ms 45 a must see are two reasons, see how New York looked back then, a filthy place. Secondly, the main lead, Zoe Lund, died at the age of 37 due a drug-related heart failure. Even as this is a revenge flick I'm more into I Spit On Your Grave. That one has more brutality and the rape scene's are more explicit. Still, Ms 45 made in the slasher era is low on gore but it's a slow builder. The mute Thana (Lund) is raped twice on one day. I've seen the full uncut version and the rape scene's for that era are low on everything. But this flick is cult due the revenge done by Thana. From killing one man by shooting him in the head to transform herself into a sexy looking killer. It's a typical Ferrara flick, love or hate it. I'm always left with mixed emotions. Just look at the last scene, slo-mo for over 10 minutes and a weird score. It's not that bad but to say it's a horror I can't say therefor there isn't any gore to catch. But for so many it's a cult flick, for me a mediocre revenge flick.Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 1/5 Story 2/5 Comedy 0/5
sol-
'Angel of Vengeance', or 'Ms. 45' as it is better known, this early career urban drama from Abel Ferrara follows a mute woman who becomes mentally unhinged after being raped both on her way home and upon arriving home after startling an intruder. Hardly ever smiling and conveying all emotion through her expressive eyes alone, Zoë Lund is superb in the lead role and the film gets off to a strong start as she initially takes a semi-rational approach to the double rape. Having killed the second rapist, Lund dismembers the body in a darkly comic manner, carrying it out of her apartment in bits and pieces. These early scenes come with some neat horror touches too, like Lund imagining blood and guts coming up from the drain of her bathtub, and as alluded to, the first half of the movie is quite strong. The second half though pushes the boundaries of both credibility and audience sympathy as Lund goes from accidentally shooting a man who followed her down a dark alleyway, to viciously killing all men who try to pick her up, to going out of her way to seduce and then murder as many men as she can lure. Understandably, she is meant to be psychotic by the end of the film, but she also becomes complete unsympathetic as she starts seducing men just in order to have victims, all the while using the one gun with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of bullets (!); plus, she is a perfect shot every time. The final attack scene that the film builds up to nevertheless needs to be seen for itself and there is something to be said for the film giving the revenge thriller formula a feminist spin.
ElWormo
Ms 45 is a movie where all the bad points seemed to cancel out all the good points, leaving a film which is very average in terms of quality, despite the fact that this is not an 'average' movie. It has a certain giallo-esque charm and rawness to its approach and the seedy tone is reminiscent of something like Fulci's New York Ripper (which it actually predates), yet it is hampered by being overly simplistic concerning the rape/revenge subject matter it chooses to explore; in a nutshell - mute girl is raped, and so she decides to kill every man she meets... The end. It's that shallow, and unfortunately a slew of less than great performances (the female lead does a decent job however) plus some rather amateur set pieces, and possibly the most annoying saxophone riff ever to be repeated 5937259 times in a row (by a guy on a trumpet not a sax, whoops) lead this one down a dark alley it's best staying away from. I fell asleep for a few minutes during the middle and couldn't even be bothered to rewind.HANDGUN (1984), although flawed, does this kind of thing a whole lot better and I would unreservedly recommend that instead.
Prismark10
Ms.45 is a low budget flick from cult director Abel Ferrara. We are back to the seedy streets of late 1970s/early 1980s New York where lurking in every corner are rapists, muggers and assorted bad guys.Zoe Lund plays Thana, a mute seamstress in the garment district who gets raped twice in one day and slowly goes mad and goes hell bent on a revenge spree very much in the vein of Death Wish and The Exterminator.The plain looking Thana transforms to a more erotic looking vixen as she actively seeks out men to punish, hence why she is Ms .45 because of her gun.The climax of the movie is a fancy dress party where even men genuinely interested in Thana's well being are in danger as she loses all control.The version of the film I saw had been cleaned up for Blu Ray, although the grimy New York of the time only got cleaned up by subsequent Mayors of the city who realised the value of the tourist dollars.The film is rather raw, some of the acting is uneven. Zoe Lund is a marvel as the vulnerable Thana.Abel Ferrara was well known in the early 1980s for his video nasties but that label is unfair to him. He really did make the best he could with meagre resources, genre films with a feminist bent.