All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun, so the old saying goes. Ms .45 takes it literally and concisely, squeezing both into the title of Abel Ferrara’s unglamourised, low-budget 1981 exploitationer, making much of the New York streets of the era and the face of its star, 18-year-old Zoë Tamerlis.
Face not voice. Tamerlis plays a mute, a seamstress in the Garment District who is driven to psychotic acts of revenge after being raped twice in the same day, first in an alley on the way home (Ferrara plays the rapist) and then again once she’s arrived back at the safe haven of her apartment.
Second time around she kills the perp, using a steam iron to send him to hell. After that the traumatised Thana (Thanatos is the Greek personification of death) sets off on a murder spree, using the dead rapist’s gun to kill any man who threatens her, before becoming more ambitious – any guy menacing any woman, and eventually any guy at all.
The men babble away in this movie and Thana, obviously, says nothing at all. Instead Ferrara uses the gun and Tamerlis’s expressive features to do the talking – big eyes, pillowy lips, clear skin. Innocence, they say, with a side order of terror, though as the killing jag goes on, Tamerlis sours things up a touch with a small curl of the lip here or a hint of a hard stare there. Ferrara meanwhile is sliding the colour palette from muted tones to bolder, starker hues as the immaculate Thana becomes an angel of vengeance (an alternative title for the movie).
This is Ferrara edging out of his exploitation years – 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy and The Driller Killer had come five and two years before respectively – and edging into his most commercially successful phase, which included The King of New York and Bad Lieutenant. Those two made much of the streets of New York, as does Ms .45, which could also function as a photo-book on pre-gentrified inner-city life. But his spare and intimate shooting style here also pre-figures a lot of Ferrara’s later work, like the brilliant and vastly underrated Welcome to New York.
Death is fun in exploitation movies and fun is being had here. I mean, raped twice in a day is a macabre joke to start with, and Ferrara and writer Nicholas St John continue on in that vein. How do you dismember a corpse? How many bits of dismembered body wrapped in newspaper and a black plastic bag can you fit into a domestic fridge? Will the downstairs neighbour’s dog sniff out Thana’s secret? These little problems and observations stud the film while Thana holds down the day job cutting and stitching at a fashion atelier, killing men as and when, and the film edges towards the Halloween party that’s going to be its climax.
Here Thana, dressed as a nun, is the box marked “religious iconography” that Catholic-raised Ferrara generally likes to tick. She looks good in her habit, demonstrating Ferrara’s eye for a strong visual, which lifts his exploitation movies above the common run. For those who like it grungy, do not fear, there is some wildly bad acting in this movie, after all an exploitation movie isn’t really an exploitation movie unless you’ve got someone ham-fistedly falling over their lines.
In the end Ferrara starts to introduce hints of doubt in the “fuck around and find out” justification for Thana’s actions, which separates the film out from the usual run of exploitationers. Tamerlis’s acting makes a micro-adjustment around this point too, justifying Ferrara’s faith in his star. Though encouraged to appear in more of his films, Tamerlis backed away from becoming part of “Abel’s stable”, as she called it, but did later co-write Bad Lieutenant with him, before giving her life over to extreme drug-taking. Dead at 37.
She’s a beauty, no mistaking, but the film is pretty good-looking too, especially considering it was shot on the cheap. Cinematographer James Lemmo would later go into advertising photography and you can see the origins of that here. This movie has a surface sheen, it is well composed, artfully framed, and all these aspects the Drafthouse 1080p restoration reveals in their true glory. Bad stuff doesn’t usually look this good.
Ms .45 – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
