Grindhouse Theater: Ms. 45 (1981)

An intensely shy seamstress, who also happens to be mute, goes insane after being attacked and raped twice in one day. Her enormous fears, which had once driven her inward, now push her to an outward course of action. After killing one of her assailants, she keeps his .45 caliber pistol, initially for protection, but ultimately for unrelenting revenge against all males. This is payback! It will never happen again! The prey now becomes the predator.

Ms. 45 (aka Angel of Vengeance) was directed by the often controversial and provocative Abel Ferrara, best known for films like The Driller Killer, King of New York, and Bad Lieutenant. It stars Zoë Tamerlis Lund.

The film was inspired by 1973's Thriller - A Cruel Picture and 1974's Death Wish. It was critically maligned on its theatrical release, but is now highly regarded among fans of exploitation cinema. It was acquired by Alamo Drafthouse Films in October 2013 and remastered in HD from the original negatives. The distributor released the film on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital copy in March 2014.

grind

A grindhouse is an American term for a theater that mainly shows exploitation films. It is named after the defunct burlesque theaters located on 42nd Street in New York City, where 'bump n' grind' dancing and striptease were featured.

In the film Lady of Burlesque (1943) one of the characters refers to the burlesque theatre on 42nd Street, where they are performing stripteases and bump and grind dances, as a "grindhouse".

The introduction of television greatly eroded the audience for local and single screen movie theatres, many of which were built during the cinema boom of the 1930s. In combination with urban decay after white flight out of older city areas in the mid to late 1960s, changing economics forced these theatres to either close or offer something that TV could not. In the 1970s these theatres were put to new use as venues for exploitation films, either adult pornography and sleaze, or slasher and dubbed martial arts films from Hong Kong.

Grindhouse films characteristically contain large amounts of sex, violence or bizarre subject matter. One genre of film featured were "roughies" or sexploitation, a mix of sex, violence and sadism. Quality varied, but low budget production values and poor print quality were common. Critical opinions varied regarding typical grindhouse fare, but many films acquired cult following and critical praise. Double, triple, and "all night" bills on a single admission charge often encouraged patrons to spend long periods of time in the theaters. The milieu was largely and faithfully captured at the time by the magazine Sleazoid Express.

By the 1980s, home video and cable movie channels threatened to render the grindhouse obsolete. By the end of the decade, these theaters had vanished from Los Angeles's Broadway and Hollywood Boulevard, New York City's Times Square and San Francisco's Market Street. By the mid 1990s, these particular theaters had all but disappeared from the US. Very few exist today.