Ms .45

Abel Ferrara opined that this made his previous film, Driller Killer, look like 'scratchings on the cave wall'. Who are we to disagree. Still working the gutter no-budget beat - a correlative to New York's no-wave punk music of the period - he brings a patina of slick visual sophistication to this rape/revenge thriller; more importantly, he allows a coherent, if extreme, feminist position to emerge. Nineteen-year-old Nastassja Kinski-lookalike Zoë Tamerlis plays Thana, a shy deaf-mute who works in New York's garment district. Raped twice within hours, she kills her second assailant and chops him up in the bathtub (an episode that finds its way into Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar). Gaining confidence, she arms herself and woe to the chauvinist who crosses her path. It's a provocative, disreputable movie, well worth seeing. Regrettably, Tamerlis never really came through on her promise, though she co-wrote and appears in Bad Lieutenant as Zoe Lund. She died in 1999 of 'heart failure'.