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Nunsploitation

Ms .45

1h 20m

Directed by Abel Ferrara • 1981 • United States
Starring Zoë Lund, Albert Sinkys, Darlene Stuto

Abel Ferrara’s exploitation-scuzz classic takes place in the cesspool of 1980s New York, where mute garment-district worker Thana (Zoë Lund, who also cowrote Ferrara’s BAD LIEUTENANT) is raped once, twice—and then something snaps. Packing a pistol and clad in leather (and later a nun’s habit), Thana handily wastes a good chunk of Manhattan’s male population, while Ferrara and Lund, at once reveling in and subverting the film’s grindhouse trappings, forge a feminist statement in extremis.

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