Mother Superior Jumped the Gun

Film: Ms .45
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I like a good exploitation film, which is why I tend to be at least mildly fascinated by the work of Abel Ferrara. Ferrara seems like a director who has genuine talent behind the camera, but has B-movie sensibilities. Moives like The Driller Killer are a good example of this. It seems strange to say this, but Ms .45 might actually be even more of an exploitation film. There’s not a great deal going on here beyond finding an excuse for murder. I wouldn’t normally call this a horror movie, but it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so here we are.

Because there’s not a great deal of plot here, I’m going to keep it pretty simple. Thana (Zoë Lund acting under the name Zoë Tamerlis) is a mute seamstress working the Garment District in New York. One day, walking home from work, she is sexually assaulted in an alley. When she gets home, her apartment is invaded by a burglar who also sexually assaults her. During this attack, she grabs a heavy glass object off her table and smacks the guy across the temple, then beats him to death with an iron and drags him into her bathtub. The next day at work, her boss Albert (Albert Sinkys) rips the blouse off a mannequin, which sends Thana into a sort of fugue state.

And now it’s going to start getting weird. Since there’s a body in her bathtub, Thana decides to dismember the body, wrap it in plastic, and store it in her fridge. She keeps the burglar’s gun, though, which is naturally a .45, which she starts to carry around with her. From this point forward, pretty much any man who talks to Thana is going to end up on the wrong end of her pistol, since now every man is a threat to her. Meanwhile, her landlady’s dog starts to be interested in Thana’s refrigerator (where the burglar’s body is stored), and Thana starts to get rid of the body parts, which are eventually found by the police.

Essentially, we’re going to get moments of Thana basically screwing up at work and not getting fired (although since she’s doing things like ruining garments she should be canned), and then going on killing sprees at night, more or less just shooting every guy she sees. At one point, she attempts to murder a guy who is consensually kissing his girlfriend.

That’s really all there is to the movie. Thana kills people because she can’t tell the difference between someone being a threat and someone just being there.

I don’t have a serious issue with revenge pictures. They’re fun when they are done well, and they’re often fun when they aren’t really done that well. There has to be a point to them, though, and there doesn’t feel like there is a real point to Ms .45. It wants to be I Spit on Your Grave, but the motivation here isn’t tracking down the guys who assaulted her. It's just tracking down all the guys. It’s potentially a more feminized version of something like Death Wish, but again, the motivation isn’t about “cleaning up the streets,” but about “let’s kill everyone indiscriminately.”

It is absolutely exploitative, and that’s the point. Once she decides to go on her mission, Thana dresses provocatively with as much cosmetics as possible. At the close of the film, when she attends a costume party, she goes as a nun wearing about 1/3 of a normal habit (and with the .45 naturally strapped to a leg holster).

This will certainly be something that some people like, but it wasn’t for me. There’s not enough here for it to be that interesting, and what is here is crass and pointless. So, this is a short review, but honestly, it’s all I’ve got for this movie.

Why to watch Ms .45: There’s a part of you that thinks you should watch Abel Ferrara movies.
Why not to watch: It's nothing more than gratuitous.