Film critic John Ryan Powell examines an underrated low-budget film that explores the ramifications of sexual assault.
Abel Ferrara is one of the most audacious filmmakers of his generation; he’s also one of the most talented. Regrettably, his talent hasn’t translated into an enduring popularity with either critics or audiences and his films, which he often struggles to get financed, are rarely shown stateside beyond New York, LA and the festival circuit. Many are difficult to track down even months or years after their initial releases on DVD and blu-ray, a travesty in 2014 when one of the few benefits of drawing breath on this stinking planet is the ready accessibility of information and entertainment. Movies made by every degree of small-minded hack can be purchased from Amazon, downloaded from iTunes or rented or streamed from Netflix, but many of the better films by one of our most vital directors languish in inaccessible obscurity. For shame but, fortunately, not so for the subject of our film of the week, Ms. 45.
The trailer for Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45.
Ferrara got his start as a filmmaker in the 70s by helming a number of low-budget porn features before securing funding for the film generally considered to be his debut, 1979’s The Driller Killer. An exploitation flick starring Ferrara himself as a man who kills a number of people with a power drill, it isn’t as auspicious a debut feature for a master filmmaker as, say, Badlands, but the kernel of Ferrara’s later genius is there.
It was with his second feature, 1981’s Ms. 45, that Ferrara truly arrived. Itself an exploitation picture of sorts, Ms. 45 is about a twice-raped mute New Yorker who goes off the deep end and begins gunning down scores of men as “revenge” with the titular handgun. It’s thanks to Ferrara’s talents, star Zoe Tamerlis’ (later Zoe Lund) believable, subtly expressive performance and the use of early 1980s NYC locations that are positively oozing with sleaze and filth, that the film rises well above its grindhouse-level subject matter to become something far better — something akin to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, which is an obvious touchstone here.
The film’s violent conclusion.
Like Polanski’s film, Ferrara’s succeeds so stunningly in part because it doesn’t endeavor to spell everything out for the viewer; it suggests that Tamerlis’s character was troubled prior to the pair of rapes that begin the picture’s action, but it doesn’t bother trying to “give it a name,” so to speak, and neither does it get bogged down in the heavy-handed morality messages of movies like Death Wish and The Brave One; it simply shows us a series of events and charts the character’s development from timid, damaged garment factory worker to confident, gun-toting man-killer.
Ms. 45 was released on Region A Blu-ray by Drafthouse back in March in a quality edition that includes interviews with director Abel Ferrara, composer Joe Delia, creative consultant Jack McIntyre, features on the life and career of Zoe Lund and a booklet featuring several essays on the film and its director. Highly recommended.
Photo–Flickr/Terror on Tape
I wrote that “Pretty in the Past” post that got linked to here and it’s one of my favourite things I’ve ever written for the Internet. I’ve loved this movie ever since I first saw it in my late teens–having found out about it via Danny Peary’s CULT FILMS II. A few months ago I got to see it in a theatre for the first time and–even though I’ve seen it at least a dozen times by now–it was like watching it new all over again. Highly recommended.