Abel Ferrara's low-budget, high-spirited thriller was one of the first films to turn the tables, caricaturing the stalk-rape-slash cycle of films while challenging it with a vengeance. Not exactly a feminist film, it is rather a neo-Gothic approach to women's psychology, set against a darkly beautiful Manhattan. A mute garment-district worker has the unbelievable misfortune of being raped twice in one day-once at gunpoint in an alley, and again by a burglar she surprises in her apartment. The latter she kills in self-defense, then stores him in her freezer. Something has happened to this once-passive innocent. She finds her "voice" in a one-woman war against obnoxious men, with which Ferrara's Manhattan is rife, picking them off as indiscriminately as she had been chosen. Zoe Tamerlis cleverly evokes the change from gamine to gun-wielding, leather-suited assassin whose greasepaint positively roars.