MS’ 45

After the troubled painter in Driller Killer, in Ferrara’s next film Ms. 45 (also screened as Angel of Vengeance) it is the turn of a seamstress to go a-murdering. The dumb girl Thana works Manhattan sewing shop and, on her way home, she is mugged and raped. When she gets home she is attacked by a burglar who also wants to rape her. She manages to defend herself with a paperweight and an iron and kills her attacker. She cuts the body up in pieces and puts it in the fridge, intending to dispose of it later. With the gun she takes off the attacker, she then goes on to shoot any other men who try to attack her. Her boss Albert and her feminist lesbian colleague Laurie gradually start to get worried about Thana’s behaviour as it gets increasingly strange.The genre of the exploitation film has acquired a militant feminist exponent with Ms. 45. As with Driller Killer after the première the critics almost universally focused on the extreme violence. Ferrara argues that wrongly no one had looked at the fact that Thana cannot speak. Zoé Tamerlis’ role as Thana did however receive praise. Kim Newman wrote in Film and Filming: ‘Ferrara presents Tamerlis’ Thana as a neutral figure whose power over her victims derives from her ability to inspire and then contradict their fantasies of femininity.’Ferrara himself plays the first rapist and looms up several more times in the film as an incarnation of male evil.