Interesting low-budget twist on the "Death Wish" theme, directed by Abel Ferrera (who later directed the harrowing "Bad Lieutenant" with Harvey Keitel) and starring the late Zoe Lund aka Tamerlis as the lovely, repressed NY mute, who decides to emulate Charles Bronson after being brutally raped. The film has its flaws, but it also has a naked power and intensity lacking in most Hollywood-style productions of this type. In the novel "Death Wish", author Brian Garfield portrayed the character of Paul Kersey as an average, overweight, middle-aged man psychologically destroyed by the violence inflicted on his loved ones and that he, in turn, inflicts on others. At the beginning of the book, he kills an armed robber who threatens him. By the end of the book, he is indiscriminately killing graffiti artists and car thieves. Garfield disavowed the movie version of his book because it portrayed the character as a hero, a rugged, all-American man-of-action. Where Garfield's novel contained ambiguities and complexities, the movie made Paul Kersey into a modern-day John Wayne. While I enjoyed the movie when I saw it as a teenager in the same way I enjoyed "Dirty Harry", it was shallow and facile in comparison to the original novel (the sequels became increasingly ridiculous and trite). "Ms. 45" takes the viewer into the psychic territory that Garfield originally intended in his book. Her character, repressed and neurotic from the beginning, descends rapidly into madness, a madness exacerbated with each killing she perpetrates. The final portion of the film, with her character of Thana dressed as a nun and kissing each bullet as she loads it into her gun, is truly chilling. It's hard to tell if Lund was a good actor (she had a bit part in "Bad Lieutenant" as a red-haired junkie who assists Keitel in getting high, and she died in real life from complications due to drug abuse) but she had a fragile, haunting beauty, which was perfectly suited for the part she was playing in this film, and she's unforgettable. "Ms. 45" isn't a perfect film, although I would assert that it is a low-budget classic of its kind, and it's not one you'll easily be able to put out of your mind once you've seen it.