ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Pluskylang Great Film overall

LouHomey From my favorite movies..

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

RanchoTuVu After being raped twice in the same afternoon, a mute seamstress in one of New York's fashion houses (Zoe Lund), obtains a 45 caliber pistol with which she metes out justice on any future potential threat from the city's sex-obsessed male population. They all seem to be standing around on corners hustling her as she passes by. But that's not really the character of this film so much as the transformation Lund's character undergoes from meek mute to sympathetic while utterly ruthless serial killer, from prey to predator, which reaches its apex when she arrives at a Halloween party that concludes the film dressed as a sexy nun with her 45 strapped to her leg. By this point the body count has risen substantially, accompanied by an other-worldly lounge jazz film score, with each victim drawn out just enough to show his sleaziest side by the great director Abel Ferrara, of whom this film must be considered among his absolute best efforts.

Sofia S Ferrara's Ms. 45 is a well executed movie about rape and revenge. The genre "rape and revenge" movies is no genre I like because it's dressed as a "feminist" take on women's way to handle rape but it's more the male directors way do exploit women by showing nudity and exploit violence to show blood. This movie is not the case which make this movie very good. It might be shot in 1980 but they really made a exploitation movie about rape and revenge in a fair way. This movie contains a plot beyond the rape and beyond the revenge to give it a bit more depth which is important. The movie might be short but it has a interesting story line. The use of the victim as a mute woman amplifier the voice of a woman in society, our voices are not heard and especially when it comes to rape and abuse against women. The rape scenes are not sexualised as in most RR movies, actually this whole movie contains no nudity of either men or women at all which is very good. It's more focused on the trauma of the act. The script is very good and Thana's muteness gives the story a very important symbolism. If you are interested in the RR genre don't watch any other film than this one because this one is actually the only one that portray the act of rape and the psychological trauma of it and the revenge of it in a fair way, without exploiting women to the degree that the movie itself become the sleazball that the men in the movie act like. Full of symbolics for female oppression and male domination and how our society is formed to not be suited and safe for women that adds depth to the movie. If it wasn't for the great script and even the acting that really made an impression (Zoë Tamerlis was so good and just about 18 years old) on me the movie wouldn't be so popular till this day but this movie appeal to an audience 36 years later and that's impressive! 99/100 recommend!

chow913 First off I've always been a fan of Italian grind house exploitation films. However I've never enjoyed the rape revenge genre. It's an interesting concept which always falls flat. 'Ms. .45' finally breaks that mold.The film's super arty directing and music really make it shine. There are however MANY leaps in logic. It's unclear if these are just sloppy plot holes or intended oddities to make the audience think. There are also clearly many other story elements taken from earlier rape revenge films.The plot: We start out in Manhattan's garment district. How do we know this? Because after the opening title it states, "Garment District, Manhattan." As to whether this was actually filmed in NYC or Italy like so many other 1980s films I have no idea. We never see any landmarks. Although the appearance of NY landmarks in other Italian films has never guaranteed they were actually filmed in NYC either.Thana (I'd never have figured out what her name was if it wasn't for the Italian subtitles. Everyone always sounds like they're calling her "Hanna" or "Diana.") is a pretty young woman with the whole shy sexy school girl look going on. She's working as a fashion tailor in 9th Avenue's only sweatshop which actually employs ONLY pretty Caucasian girl whom actually speak English... or Italian.On her way back to her apartment above the stereotypical old spinster Thana is raped by two separate men in two separate attacks within 3 minutes. First in an ally by a masked stranger, and second by a burglar inside her apartment.The rape scenes themselves have to be the tamest in film history! Seriously, all rape is violent but these two rape scenes last only seconds and are just a close up of Thana's pain filled face. Rape revenge fans are expecting more! The first attack leaves Thana mute? It's NEVER explained if she was simply mute all along or traumatized by the attack. But anyway she's mute throughout the film. ('Thriller: A Cruel Picture.') During the next attack Thana clubs the burglar with a glass apple killing him instantly. At this point she has a psychotic break with reality. Being raped in two totally separate attacks within 3 minutes can do that to a girl. Even though her killing was 100% morally and legally justified she doesn't call the police and instead calmly dismembers the body. What she can't fit down the toilet she saves in the refrigerator and gets rid of the body parts piece by piece by simply leaving them in random street trash cans all over the city over the course of the film. And yes, we do get to see random bums find those body parts.The biggest plot hole is that Thana's .45 caliber rage isn't taken out on actual rapists or her masked rapists, or even criminals in general. She just kills random people. So she's not out for justice? She's just a psycho killer? In fact the second person she kill is just a guy trying to give her back purse! WTF? Thana does kills some muggers, but one guy she just meets in a bar and the other guys are just slimeballs trying to pick her up. I guess the mere fact that they were trying to pick her up and not simply rape her proves they're not rapists.She also keeps getting hit on by her boss. I kept guessing the climax would be that he was the first masked rapist. But the masked man is never revealed. The movie simply ends with Thana dressing up as a nun and going postal on her coworkers at their Halloween office party. Wait, her coworkers were her friends! Why's she killing them? It's also never explained where she gets all the extra ammo. Hello, they didn't have GunBroker.com in the 80s. The film passes up a great opportunity for a scene like 'The Terminator' where the title character just calmly walks into a gun shop and loads up. She'd be too young to buy ammo legally so we can only presume the burglar with the .45 brought a lot of ammo with him.In conclusion this is a very odd rape and revenge film as there are rapes but no real revenge, just the heroin going postal on people totally unrelated to her suffering.Despite all the MAJOR plot holes I really did enjoy this film for its arty directing and music. The shooting scenes are done very well. It's like 'Bad Lieutenant' meets 'Nikita' meets 'I Spit On Your Grave.' A jail bait school girl wielding a .45 is always worth watching. I look forward to the sequel, Mrs. .357.

chaos-rampant This goes straight in my list of great cult items. The good news is that it's not just great exploitation, it's an intriguing little thing in general. It's all about sensuality of course. The famous poster announces as much upfront. A mute young girl is raped, in one of those mad exploitive strokes twice the same day, freaks out and goes on a killing spree around New York. But the whole thing has less to do with Death Wish with its implacable morality and more with something like Taxi Driver or Carrie, situated closer to the eye than the world.The metaphor used to convey this, a wonderful one, seen in the opening scene where she models a dress for a buyer, is that when she moves the material seems to flow around her. So we are tethered to her as she moves through the world, ripping the seams. Things flow around her, mostly lusting men. A street hoodlum chases her. A photographer invites her to his studio for pictures. A Saudi oil sheik picks her up in a limo. In a bizarre scene, she executes four or five gangbangers one of whom has nunchucks! Her boss is really kind with her but he obviously wants more.It's all a bit unreal seen through her eyes, many hazy shots and fades. And it's all kept in a simple comic-book style, not as we know the term now but as it was meant before the movie craze and big dumb stuff like Tomb Raider, a quick sketch.The climax is astonishingly effective; it happens in a Halloween party so we can have this unusual fabric of disguised men and charged atmosphere, herself dressed as a sexy nun and just tears everything, slowing the time into epileptic strobe, heightening images, the most startling of those being a man dressed as a bride who as she kills, the veil and wig fall of his head and hang on a door, severing as it were the purer image from the taint.Ferrara would extend a few of these notions in his more ambitious Blackout, but this is probably better.