Ms. 45 [1981] – A Feminist Icon Of Revenge

Ms. 45 is the ultimate rape-and-revenge movie, and its iconic star Zoë Lund might just be the most unforgettable cult heroine in cinema. She is the Angel of Vengeance, almost a female rival to Travis Bickle when it comes to cleaning the scum off the New York streets. This trash classic is as much a sleazy exploitation flick as it is a significant feminist film. Its enduring legacy is undisputed.

There’s no pussyfooting around here and the film starts with brute force, not wasting time with introductions: Thana, the innocent, mute, shy young woman coming home from work gets raped twice. First in a dirty backstreet, then when she gets home, still shaken. (Second rapists is no other than the director Abel Ferrara himself!) She manages to kill her second assailant in self-defence and hides the body. We then witness this timid woman turning into a confident femme fatale, an Angel of Death, a Vigilante Queen! She takes to the streets and starts hunting down men with her 45 caliber pistol.

As the audience we are completely on her side and we applaud for each time she gets rid of a scummy man. Because in this city and in this world all men are inherently, essentially pigs and they all mistreat women one way or another. They all try to take advantage of her and her sisters, and the world is better off without them. She is doing it for the sake of all wronged women out there. It’s an amazing achievement how a male filmmaker succeeds in making the mostly male audience of an exploitation movie clap their hands and cheer for a psychotic, deranged female character as she shoots, castrates, dismembers multiple males, some of them just guilty of being males that cross her path. She can’t speak, she acts – and she acts for all the women who can’t speak out.

The film is inspired by vigilante and revenge movies of the ’70s, like Death Wish, Taxi Driver and Thriller… A Cruel Picture (1973), a Swedish rape-and-revenge exploitation classic. Another obvious influence on it is Polanski’s Repulsion (1965), with many parallels between Lund’s and Catherine Deneuve’s character. Critically derided in its release, it has grown in status and is now highly regarded by both critics and cult film fans. It is a highly stylized and ultra-fetishistic movie with a knock-out surreal finale. Abel Ferrara and the screenwriter went on to produce more acclaimed films, like King of New York, The Addiction and The Funeral. Ferrara collaborated with Zoë (Tamerlis) Lund once again with another gritty cult classic, Bad Lieutenant (1992). This time Zoë Lund was the screenwriter along with Ferrara and only had a small part as an actress.

Zoë was not even 18, only a high school girl when Ms. 45 was made (shot in early 1980), her first role. She was a talented musician and composer as a young girl. A New York City native, her unique beauty probably owed to her Romanian and Swedish descent, which helped her have a career in modeling and acting. In 1984, she starred in the legendary Larry Cohen’s Special Effects. Several film projects followed, before she died in 1999 at the age of 37. Zoë never kept her heroin addiction secret and openly defended it. Ferrara said: “She loved heroin, she was killed by heroin”. She died of heart failure due to cocaine use, which she replaced with heroin in her last years.

To conclude with Zoë’s own words, here’s how she talks about her character in Ms. 45: “She was very innocent. She had a conscience but not a whit of consciousness until she is raped. The film obviously is about physical rape — but it’s truly, in my more elaborate view, about anyone who’s been raped or screwed over in any way. “