Around the World: Ms. 45 (1981; dir. Abel Ferrara); Trauma, Gender Violence, and Revenge Fantasies
(Trigger warning: this review involves discussion of sexual assault, trauma, and gender violence.) Two years after the release of his gritty and noisy murder-fest, The Driller Killer (1979), Abel Ferrara returned to the director’s helm with Ms. 45 (1981), a revenge “fantasy” film. Though Ms. 45 still demonstrates some of that rawness present in Ferrara’s first feature film production, it is by far a smoother film, making excellent use of its mostly unknown and untested cast, especially Zoë Lund, the protagonist from which the title, Ms. 45, gets its name. Of Ferrara’s early films, Ms. 45 is certainly the most compelling, if not because it is a tighter, thematically expedient production, then because of its somewhat brutal (and uncompromising) exposure of the sexist underbelly of NYC — a common theme, it seems, in Ferrara’s work.
Around the World: The Driller Killer (1979; dir. Abel Ferrara)
As Abel Ferrara’s first non-porn feature film, The Driller Killer serves as a signpost of the director’s vision of New York City and its social ills. Ferrara would hone this vision into a more coherent film three years later (in Ms. 45), but in The Driller Killer, he was, I think, in his rawest form: vulgar, uncompromising, and noisy. It’s not surprising, then, that the film was banned in the UK in 1983 given that its UK distribution included a still shot of one of the more gruesome scenes in the entire movie: a man having a drill bit shoved into his skull. What is surprising is that, as Mike Bor of the British Board of Film Classification notes, Ferrara’s film was “almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act of 1984,” a reactionary piece of legislation that required creative works to be classified to be legally sold; unclassified works, as such, would be banned.
