Critics reviews

With Grand Guignol relish, Ferrara depicts a city in the throes of a Wild West lawlessness that invites vigilante action (the Guardian Angels are thanked in the end credits). But his sardonic documentary portraits of cheesy styles of macho seduction set up an implacable gender opposition of legendary dimensions, beyond politics and perhaps beyond redress.

Ms .45" is lit like a student film and, aside from its star... characterized by some atrocious acting. Still, as Andrew Sarris once wrote of Edgar G. Ulmer, Mr. Ferrara's "camera never falters." Although it was taken for an eccentric splatter film rather than a midnight movie, "Ms .45" is a highly self-aware mash-up of "Repulsion," "Death Wish" and "Carrie," as well as "Taxi Driver." A riff on "Manhattan" offers further evidence of the filmmaker's goonish savoir-faire.

What's terrific about the film is the way Ferrara is able to delineate a fierce sense of 1980 New York as a sparse, poisonously fertile combat zone where the daily grind of alienated work, dread, tedium, social compartmentalization, and impersonality cohabit with untold allegorical possibilities... Ferrara brings moral questions and human agency together with all these satiric elements and genre riffs and furtive spiritual asides, as a physical part of the fabric of city life.

Ferrara displays his chops all over the place, displaying a leap of control from what could be seen in The Driller Killer. The film often displays sophisticated direction; take, for example, the killing of the gang who follow Thana, set up with a high-angle establishing shot that arranges the men in a star pattern around her like a spaghetti-western stand-off. In fact, the film may show off more classical chops than much of Ferrara's subsequent work, even those with more money and name talent.

With Grand Guignol relish, Ferrara depicts a city in the throes of a Wild West lawlessness that invites vigilante action (the Guardian Angels are thanked in the end credits). But his sardonic documentary portraits of cheesy styles of macho seduction set up an implacable gender opposition of legendary dimensions, beyond politics and perhaps beyond redress.

Nicholas St. John's pungent screenplay is a blueprint of exploitation and retribution full of drains regurgitating shredded flesh, body parts crammed into duffel bags, and saxophones shrieking into the night. Above all, there's Lund's zonked-out grace as her Thana wraps the film's gender conflicts in a sexy nun costume, unleashing a slow-mo apocalypse in the climactic phantasmagoric masquerade and expiring between a male partygoer in bridal drag and a female co-worker wielding a phallic knife...

Ultimately, the structure of Ms. 45 liberates delirious flashes (Thana re-sees the first rapist in her bathroom mirror, and at night she has dreams in which she hears her own voice as a child) that, tacked onto the overall composition in this fashion, escape the confines of the narrative anecdote.