Ms .45

Ms .45

1981 "She was abused and violated. It will never happen again!"
Ms .45
Ms .45

Ms .45

6.8 | 1h21m | R | en | Action

A shy and mute seamstress goes insane after being attacked and raped twice in one day. She wanders the New York streets at night in a sexy black dress with her attacker's gun strapped to her garter belt, blowing away any man who tries to pick her up.

View More
Rent / Buy
amazon
Buy from $7.99 Rent from $2.99
AD

WATCH FREEFOR 30 DAYS

All Prime Video
Cancel anytime

Watch Now
6.8 | 1h21m | R | en | Action , Thriller , Crime | More Info
Released: April. 24,1981 | Released Producted By: Navaron Films , Country: United States of America Budget: 0 Revenue: 0 Official Website:
Synopsis

A shy and mute seamstress goes insane after being attacked and raped twice in one day. She wanders the New York streets at night in a sexy black dress with her attacker's gun strapped to her garter belt, blowing away any man who tries to pick her up.

...... View More
Stream Online

The movie is currently not available onine

Cast

Zoë Lund , Abel Ferrara , Helen McGara

Director

Ruben Masters

Producted By

Navaron Films ,

AD

Watch Free for 30 Days

All Prime Video Movies and TV Shows. Cancel anytime.

Watch Now

Trailers & Images

Reviews

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!
preppy-3 Zoe Lund (who was only 17 at the time of filming) plays Thana a mute woman who works in the garment district of NYC. When going home one day she's viciously raped. She stumbles home and finds a burglar in her apartment. He also rapes her but she kills him. She then gets his gun and goes out at night and kills all the men who try to attack her or other women. Then she starts killing men who have done nothing wrong.Dark and depressing film. Filmed in the early 1980s on location in NYC it presents a very negative view of the city and its citizens. All the men are portrayed as scum that deserve what they get. Surprisingly this was written and directed by two men! It's tough stuff but you have to applaud a movie that doesn't hold back. Lund is terrific in her role (hard to believe she was only 17) and it's very well-directed by Abel Ferrara. LOVE how he stages the scene when Thana is stalked by four men in Central Park. There's actually not a lot of violence in the movie but what's there is pretty strong. This was not a big hit when it came out. It was too dark for most viewers. However it did well on the midnight movie circuit. It basically just disappeared (cable TV stations won't touch it) until it was reissued in a beautiful transfer on DVD a few years back. Dark and gritty but important.
Horst in Translation (filmreviews@web.de) "Ms .45" is an American movie from 1981, so this one had its 35th anniversary last year. The director is Abel Ferrara and he is probably somewhat known, certainly more known than screen play writer Nicholas St. John and at least as much as lead actress Zoë Lund in her very first performance. She plays the title character, a woman who gets raped early on in the movie and from that moment on goes on revenge path against men and keeps shooting everybody who gets in front of her and slightly does not act like a perfect gentleman. That's the whole story and while I felt that the film started off relatively solid, it gets uninteresting quickly and I must say it never recovers from that during its 80 minutes runtime. Quite a shame as I know Ferrara can do better than that. You may decide for yourself if you see this as a feminist, androgynist, sexist movie or none of these. One thing that is for sure though is how absolutely stunning and beautiful Lund looks in here. She had me glued to the screen and even if her acting is probably not on par with her looks, it was still a bearable watch mostly thanks to her. With another lead actress, it would have been an even weaker movie. The film hits rock-bottom probably when they show her in that nun costume and at that point it has a bit of a Jess Franco aura to it already and there is not that much quality anymore, if any at all. Lund is of course the most known cast member, unless you count Ferrara's cameo. Still, it makes me sad to see she died so early and with what her thought on drugs were. But she left us this film here, or maybe I should say "her performance" and the looks on her tremendous body as the film itself is just not good unfortunately. I have to give it a thumbs-down. Nothing worth seeing beyond Lund.
Blake Peterson The girls-with-guns fetish is a major erotic element in the exploitation genre, so much so that it's hard to imagine a one-sheet movie poster for a low-budgeted action flick without one. The most notable, including (but not limited to) "They Call Her One Eye", "Foxy Brown", and "Hannie Caulder", were bonkers revenge beasts that pushed the boundaries of already boundary pushing territory — and 1981's "Ms. 45" is arguably the sensational peak of the juxtaposing subgenre. The third film of exploitation-to-slightly-mainstream sensation Abel Ferrara ("Bad Lieutenant", "Body Snatchers"), "Ms. 45" is an explosive portrait of a serial killer, disguised as a luscious ode to the earlier, more substantial revenge flicks of the 1970s.Though it has Ferrara's greasy fingerprints smeared all over it, "Ms. 45" is Zoë Lund's show — an ethereal beauty with looks just as comparable to Lauren Bacall as they are to an alien women from a distant planet, Lund plays Thana, a mute seamstress who lives alone in a dumpy apartment on the bad side of town. Day after day, she and her female co-workers are harassed by street punks who catcall with underlying threat. While her peers have the ability to flip the bird at a potential predator or throw out an insult to make the message clear, Thana is forced to remain quiet, giving most the idea that she likes the constant coos. One particularly rough day, she is raped at gunpoint in an alleyway by a sadistic masked goon, who gets away before she can contact the authorities. Beaten up and understandably traumatized, she barely makes it up to her apartment. Only seconds into gathering her thoughts and understanding the reality of the situation, though, she finds herself in the presence of yet another attacker, who coincidentally hid in the flat during her horrifying walk home. He too proceeds to sexually assault her, but he doesn't get away with it — while under duress, Thana grabs a nearby glass fixture and slams it against his head, killing him instantly.A few paranoid encounters later (though none of them nearly as serious as her prior two damaging experiences), Thana goes from silent victim to femme fatale, embarking on a path of revenge with eyes set only on the male sex. Only she doesn't murder in self- defense — she targets men violent toward women, men showing care for women, and men just walking around and, you know, being men. Like Catherine Deneuve in 1965's "Repulsion", she is little more than a maniac on the loose; but her bloody journey is one of extreme piquancy, unjustifiable yet magnificently cathartic. Thana's quest acts as a sort of metaphor for the crushing societal norm of male dominance, playing out like a potential scenario if women stopped taking unwanted come-ons and didn't let rape become an undiscussed taboo, thus avenging the wrongs done to them by a culture that accepts inequality.But this is only a passing analyzation, considering "Ms. 45" was made as a violent exercise in cinema, laced in sadomasochism, gritty street danger, and visual eroticism. N.G. St. John's screenplay is extremely simplistic, setting up an abundance of climactic scenarios and allowing Lund to do most of the heavy lifting; and aside from a myriad of visual exultations (the rainy noir texture of Thana's first moonlit mass killing, the shot reminiscent of Woody Allen's "Manhattan", the harrowing finale, which is a slow-motion account of a massacre at a Halloween party during which Thana masquerades as a killer nun), Ferrara mostly does the same. Lund's expressive face, lit with, as Janet Maslin puts it, "exoticism of the fashion-magazine kind", tells a story all on its own, beginning with a meek innocence and morphing into something savage akin to Jean Gillie in "Decoy". It's impossible to take one's eyes off of her otherworldly facsimile. So simultaneously virginal and deadly, it makes her actions all the more terrifying.Ridiculed upon release, it's a blessing that "Ms. 45" finally received the notoriety it deserved after Drafthouse Films put a spotlight on its low-budget shocks once again in 2013. Though hardly a masterpiece, it is an exploitation piece of the highest quality, unforgettable and thoughtfully made.