This low-budget, high-spirited thriller caricatures the stalk-rape-murder cycle of films while challenging it with a vengeance. While not exactly a feminist film, it is rather a neo-Gothic approach to women's psychology. Set against a darkly beautiful Manhattan and Joe Delia's wicked tenor sax solos, Ms. 45 culminates in a Halloween sequence that gives “costume party” a new meaning. The plot concerns a timid, mute garment district worker who has the unbelievable misfortune of being raped twice in one day--once at gunpoint in a deserted alley on the way home from work, and then again by a burglar she surprises in her apartment. The latter she kills in self-defense, but when she proceeds to store him in pieces in her freezer, it becomes clear that something has happened to this once-passive innocent. Indeed, she has entered into a one-woman war against all obnoxious, horny men, with which Manhattan is rife. Armed with a new “look” and the .45 she has claimed from her first conquest (now frozen), she embarks on a “rape” spree of her own, choosing her victims as indiscriminately as she had been chosen. Zoe Tamerlis gives a clever performance in making the change from gamine to gun-wielding, leather-suited, heavily-made-up assassin.
A Village Voice review notes that director Abel Ferrara “keeps the film moving with a good eye for locations, a raunchy sense of visual wit, and a cartoonish appreciation for midtown Manhattan street life. Like The Howling, Ms. 45 is steeped in film school references...(and) funny asides.... I won't make a case for Ms. 45's progressive politics, but there's a sex-and-language subtext here that could keep a bevy of Lacanians in symposia for years.”