Ms. 45 - Angel of Vengeance.

First off, sorry it’s been a couple of days since a review, just after I said I’d be doing more reviews now I’m on holiday as well! I have a habit of doing things like that, huh? You can blame alcohol and me furiously trying to finish my book to do my first ever book review (since I’ve reviewed pretty much every other form of entertainment). But here I am, back with another exploitation movie, Ms. 45 - Angel of Vengeance. Enjoy!

For those who aren’t exploitation fans, which I can fully understand, even a brilliant exploitation movie is normally pretty shitty by general film standards. They were normally low budget excuses for gratuitous violence and sex with any narrative just used for padding to get to the next set piece of violence or sex and any narrative and acting actually included, well they may as well have not bothered, since it was usually pretty damn piss poor. 

Even knowing that though, this film was bad, not bad but exploitation brilliance, just a plain shit film. By no means the worse film I’ve ever seen, but still pretty damn shitty. Which is a shame, because I actually skipped past a number of titles on my list to get to this one because an exploitation movie about a chick taking revenge is pretty much everything I could ask from a movie. But boy, boy did they fuck that up. And here was me thinking that wasn’t possible.

If you wanted to, you could pretty much excuse most of the films lacking areas in narrative by the fact the film is basically the document of one women’s descent into pure madness. And her descent is pretty understandable since she was raped TWICE in the SAME FUCKING DAY. I mean what are the fucking chances? She’s also a mute (I don’t really know why, aside from a few basic things, it never really plays an important role in her character or the film in general) but I guess we’ll just chalk that off as another excuse to kill men.

The ‘story’ (hahaha oh you!) goes a little like this: Thana works in Harrods and makes dresses, she is also a mute and is kinda hot, but her eyes a little far apart and her eyebrows are a little thick and…oh right, yeah the narrative, sorry just padding so this isn’t over in one sentence. Much like how the movie pads so it doesn’t finish in five minutes. One day on the way home from grocery shopping, she is raped at gunpoint. She seems like an obedient little bitch because she can’t scream, since she is a mute. And later in the film, we find out she can scream, meaning her muteness is psychological, do we ever find out what traumatic event caused her muteness? Nope, course fucking not. And although it’s a shame we don’t, since it’d add some meat to her paper thin character, but the same token it’d probably turn her into another exploitation cliche, probably raped in her childhood by a close relative. When she gets home from this traumatic event she finds some guy has broken into her flat. After asking her where the money is, he decides he wants a piece of that ass and gets down to raping her himself. Mid rape, Thana clutches an ornament and kills him. Thus begins her descent into madness. Taking his .45 she sets out and seeks out to kill male kind for pretty much any reason she likes. There’s also a scene of her cutting a man up in a bathtub. Upon researching, I couldn’t find if this was the first movie to do this, but I’ve seen many a film released after this with a very familiar scene.

The main reason this film didn’t work for me, is that despite the whole descent into madness thing which works as some giant excuse, there felt very little context for the violence (even by exploitation standards). Thana would just stumble across some guy who happened to even look in her direction and she’d shoot him. 

Some of my favourite revenge movies ever, a few I think I’ve reviewed on this blog, generally have the same plot. A good person, who is kind and follows the law and is loving and has a good family etc etc survives a horrible crime, whether it be rape, violence, murder - whatever. They seek the help of the proper authorities and systems that are meant to be there to provide justice and protect the innocent and so on and they fail to do these things, in some cases, even aiding the criminals. So the good person then takes upon themselves to get their own justice and says ‘fuk do poleese’. And although the final part is often what puts people off revenge movies, due to the general moral greyness of turning our hero into just as bad as the villain without pointing them out as being inherently evil while still claiming the villain is well…the villain even though they’ve done no worse than the hero by this point is a little too challenging for them. And I get that, but it’s still that moment the downtrodden underdog kills the first Fuck that the justice system protected that has me leaping out of my chair and cheering, every fucking time, better than sex, I tell ya. And you guessed it, this film, this film lacks any of that. 

Thana doesn’t go to the police and although she kills one rapist while he is raping her, the first guy who rapes her, she never bothers to hunt him down. Instead she just kills every man she meets. Without her having an emotional attachment to the men she’s killing and they are merely surrogates, we can’t relate to her or share her vengeance. They themselves have done nothing to her, so why should we care? 

The narrative then goes on to become thinner and thinner to the point where I think the film is just basically saying, ‘by now you know she’s nuts, roll with it’ and it all leads to a slow motion multi kill where Thana herself is killed. No real story to speak off, no real direction for any bits of story that are there and no real ending to speak of. What a piece of shit.

Oh yeah, did I mention the acting? Yeah even for an exploitation film, the acting is fucking ass. Especially the fucking landlady, oh my God, every time she was on screen I wanted to take Thana’s .45 and shoot the landlady myself. I’m pretty sure some of the piss poor acting was instead down to having some fucking awful lines to work with but the landlady was just a really shit actress. She was probably the directors or someone on the crews Mum or something. And did I mention the music? Oh my God, that noisy, obnoxious, in your face, gets in the way fucking sax and that damn tune at the costume party, it was just a load of fucking horrible noise. And did I mention the jump scares? Yeah this has to be the first exploitation film I’ve seen with them, shame jump scares suck in general but here they’re made ten times worse by a screamy fucking sax. And did I mention all the SYMBOLISM? I don't know how a film can be so heavy handed in its pretention and yet still not really convey any sort of message.

So do I recommend this movie? God no, stay away from this piece of shit. Look through my old reviews, you’ll find some reviews there of much better revenge movies. After those, hit me up and I’ll name you some more. Wow, there’s always so much more to write when a film is this shit. This is almost twice as long as the last review! Anyway, until next time, where I might move onto some horror films in my list (my second favourite genre), avoid this stain of a film. 

Think About It!

-Locke.