Weird Movie Club: She Wants Revenge

Ms. 45 (1981)

The revenge film typically is a very rigid format to work within.  Its dictates are simple: unrepentant evil, an easily relatable protagonist, and lots of blood.  And on a very basic level Ms. 45 fulfills that purpose, but beyond that it also stretches itself into much darker territory.

Given enough time, every genre will have individuals who will branch out into diverging paths.  Today it's so common that it's almost more shocking when a movie isn't incorporating or blending elements from various genres.  In the early 1980s the revenge film was still experiencing a nascent success propelled on the back of films like Death Wish and First Blood.  Despite this, there had already been some rumbling within the barely established structure of revenge-fueled thrillers.  In 1972, acting as a precursor to what would become an entrenched subset within revenge films, Wes Craven's Last House on the Left debuted to shocked audiences.  While being billed a straight horror movie, the story would influence decades of film to follow, specifically its success acting as a catalyst for distributors to begin releasing more sexually violent films.  This would culminate in the release of 1978's I Spit On Your Grave, another "horror story" that owed little to the era's supernatural thrillers of Hammer or undead gut-munching of George Romero.  With I Spit On Your Grave, a new sub-classification within revenge films was born: rape-and-revenge.

 As already noted, the new rape-and-revenge film borrowed heavily from the atmosphere of horror films, but transposed that onto an action film revenge plot.  Whereas most of the revenge films of the day would focus on surly thugs getting pay-back on their crooked partners, or the suburban downtrodden rising up against the streets, the rape-and-revenge film mired itself in horror's misogynistic cliches.  Most were films following a last girl who was out for vengeance after she (and possibly others) were wronged by male society; although, it would be difficult to classify any of these films as feminist tracts.  They were almost exclusively made by men, for men; the central conceit of these films was rape, and the filmmakers would often linger on that in an attempt to wring as much sleaze from the film as possible.

When it was released in 1981, Ms. 45 stood in stark contrast to its fore bearers.  Despite its exploitation pedigree, the film both subverts and attacks what few conventions had already been established within the rape-and-revenge genre.  And this is also in spite (or possibly because) of its creator, a young Bronx male filmmaker by the name of Abel Ferrara.

Prior to making Ms. 45, Mr. Ferrara was already well-versed in exploitation cinema having made a low-budget proto-slasher in The Driller Killer.  That film, despite being steeped in New York's underground art culture, was typical of what would be the conventions of modern day slasher films.  Based on the slasher genre's questionable sexual politics, it would be hard to imagine a young man like Mr. Ferrara capable of delivering anything more than a rote descent into mindless violence, but Ms. 45 is a careful assault on genre conventions.

The film begins almost as a parody, as our protagonist Thana is raped not once, but twice, by different attackers, but the film quickly emerges as something more biting: satire.  Where simple parody would lampshade the rape-and-revenge genre's exploitation of sex and violence, Ms. 45's satire ridicules the modern era's view of women as sexual objects.  Men don't look, they leer; they don't talk, they catcall and affix demeaning nicknames to their targets.  Ms. 45's Thana quickly blossoms from a wide-eyed victim into a cold aggressor.

And where a lesser film would rest on the notion of a hot chick with a gun shooting dudes as empowerment, Ms. 45 trips even further down the rabbit hole by refusing to make its protagonist identifiable in any way.  Most rape-and-revenge films build up monstrous antagonists whose deaths we can enjoy.  In Ms. 45 every man is a potential rapist in Thana's eyes, so all men must be killed as she quickly descends from avenging angel into spree killer.  This is where the film becomes infinitely more interesting.

What appears to be a simple feminist slant on a male fantasy transitions into a much darker exploration of where power and madness can meet.  Thana reaches a point of no return where she is unable to distinguish between aggressor and the aggrieved.  Towards the end of the film, she meets a divorced man in a bar whom she lures to a secluded park.  She listens to the man detail his wretched marriage until her gun jams and is taken from her.  In a surprising twist, the man turns the gun on himself and miraculously the gun works.

It's a pivotal scene demonstrating Thana's disconnect.  The man has done nothing to her, and in fact was cheated on by his ex-wife, so in a sense, he would qualify as a victim.  In some sense, though, he understands her point of view which causes him to turn the gun on himself.  It's the clear point in the film where we realize she can no longer make that distinction, or possibly doesn't even care to.  It's the aggrieved becoming the aggressor.

Even more than that, the ending speaks to the dark irony of Thana's descent.  In a scene echoing the finale of Carrie, Thana takes her vengeance out on the male guests of a Halloween party.  In particular, her last victim is a young man in drag.  We see Thana position herself to shoot the man as one of her female friends holds a knife as a surrogate phallus.  Thana kills the young man, who never once makes an aggressive advance towards her, but cannot bring herself to shoot the woman who stabs her.

In the end, Ms. 45 will never be canonized as a piece of great cinema.  It's a misanthropic exploitation film which attacks every group that would normally accept it, pulling no punches for any of those groups when its gaze is focused.  But it's an exceptionally intelligent piece of cinema masquerading as sleaze, and it succeeds on both ends, a rare achievement if ever there was one.