golden age of VHS part five--another vision of late 70's- New York-as-hell, Abel Ferrara's still-riveting Ms. .45--

"The smarmy creep follows her for block after block, prattling all the while about how he's a photographer and a great appreciator of beauty, apparently so caught up in himself and his spiel that he simply does not notice the woman's utter silence. Finally, he asks Thana if she would come back to his studio with him to take a few pictures. The deciding factor seems to be the offensively familiar manner in which he wraps his hand around hers as he makes this fateful suggestion; Thana follows him back to his place, alright, and then empties an entire clip into him from inside the elevator."

another essay here--

"The final party scenes in Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) and Ms .45 are twins, they have the same configuration, the principle of reprising an earlier scene, but especially the extended use of silent slow motion. Carrie and Thana are both poor victims who explode the final scene by inverting their usual roles. If Thana doesn't possess the same powers as Carrie, she gets the same results with her gun: bodies hurled against walls. Faced with this movement all around them, Thana and Carrie, the characters in the centre of the spider's web, stand immobilised like statues. Thana resembles a mannequin on a turning plinth. The machine spins out of control, it must make everything disappear, everything except the other. In Carrie as well, Amy Irving, the sister who is spared, is the other who takes the initiative, who stops the machine. She is directly designated by Thana who calls her name, and by Carrie who grabs her arm (the last scene of Carrie, Amy's dream).

Thana and Carrie are therefore blood sisters, united by colour. The red which Thana wears on her body and her face and the red of the flames which covers Carrie..."

Star Zoe Termerlis Lund later co-wrote and appeared in "The Bad Lieutenant" for Ferrara. She died in 1999.