With an absurd energy, abhoring tepidity, careening between humor and violence, its aesthetic pulpy, exaggerated, deliriously campy and gritty, with an acid depiction of gender politics that reaches its apex of off-kilter pathos with a drunken cuckold’s confession of killing a cat, Ferrara’s film slowly builds to its pivotal moment, when traffic lights smear on a rainy windshield as jazz explodes on the sountrack and two men die, and then it cuts to the killer, the titular Ms. 45, applying layer upon layer of red lipstick, transforming her big luscious lips into an abstract symbol of attraction—she’s all symbol, a mute, silently suffering the indignities put upon her sex by a stream of men who just keep talking at her, finally ending up scantily dressed as a nun with flaming red lips, dishing out death with a .45 revolver, a mad confluence of archetypes, feminine purity and sexual object and bloody revenge—and once that lipstick goes on, the film never turns back, osculating on orbits somewhere past the edge of the ridiculous, climaxing with a bloodbath at a costume party set to blaring jazz, intercut with an argument about a vasectomy and a discussion of the price of buying a virgin for a night.
