The Driller Killer

I first saw this in the early 90s on a vhs.

Revisited the 101 mins uncut version recently.

Imagine u have to share an apartment with ur girlfriend n her drug addicted lesbian friend.

Imagine u live in a neighborhood full of derelicts.

Imagine ur girlfriend n her lesbian friend makes huge telephone calls n u r unable to pay the bills.

Imagine u r unable to pay the rent n ur landlord gives u a skinned rabbit for dinner.

Imagine u have neighbors in the form of a band called Roosters n its lead member named Tony Coco Cola and the group constantly play loud music while u r trying to concentrate on ur living aka paintings.

Imagine seeing huge electricity bills.

Imagine the art gallery owner mocks ur painting n refuse to buy the piece or bail u out.

Imagine if ur girlfriend leaves u for her bald ex husband.

Imagine ur girlfriend has a nasty habit of reading sadistic news from the newspapers.

News : "A lady gave her poodle a bath and being late for a beauty parlor appointment placed the dog in a microwave oven to dry it off.

When she turned the oven on, the poodle exploded."

Imagine ur girlfriend is persuading u to listen to the same band which constantly plays in the apartment next to u but this time in a club.

Ur reaction : "I hear em play day n nite."

Ur girlfriend's answer : "It's nothing like hearing em in a club."

U babbling, "Yeah, at least in a club, one can walk out."

Just imagine the plight of the lead character, Reno Miller in this movie going thru all the above mentioned stress.

Ok, i get it. Reno Miller is lucky not to go thru this pandemic lockdown too.

This is probably best looked at in the context of Ferrara's other work, rather than in the context of the rest of the British video nasties list, because it is actually a surprisingly good film. Rather than a mere body count movie, Ferrara's first movie is a Repulsion-style portrait of a man's descent into psychosis; a bleak yet darkly comic urban paranoia movie with actually far less graphic bloodletting than its detractors would have us believe. Despite the obvious low budget, the acting and cinematography are all perfectly competent in evoking the claustrophobically squalid milieu which leads to the breakdown of the protagonist (played by the director himself). The film's power lies in its accumulation of individual scenes and images, though unfortunately it fails to maintain the tense atmosphere, as interest begins to wane towards the end. This is an interesting and technically accomplished film from a first-time director, introducing the same distinct visual style and themes which have dominated his later films. As a piece of late-70's low-budget independent exploitation cinema, it is head and shoulders above the rest.

In New York, the painter Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara) shares a loft with his girlfriend Carol (Carolyn Marz), who left her husband Stephen, and their roommate Pamela (Baybi Day). Reno is having difficulties to pay his bills, while is obsessed painting his masterpiece, a buffalo with a hypnotic eye. When a punk band moves to his building playing day and night, Reno cannot sleep and drives insane, going to the streets with a driller, killing homeless derelicts. When the art dealer calls his painting a mockery, and Carol returns to her husband, leaving him alone, Reno goes totally mad.

"The Driller Killer" is polemic, forbidden in England in the 80's, but it is a good low budget slasher movie. The red color very alive prevails in most of the scenes, and together with the nervous camera, provoke a sort of discomfort sensation in the viewer. The characters and the insanity process of Reno are very well constructed, and the story also captures the punk wave of that moment in New York. There is a good and worth explanation for the church scene in the beginning of the movie in IMDb Message Board written by SyZombieLoserKid. Although indicated for specific audiences, "The Driller Killer" is a good film. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "O Assassino da Furadeira" ("The Driller Killer")

Note: On 26 September 2022, I saw this film again.

Abel Ferrara's 'The Driller Killer' is generally best know for igniting the "video nasty" debate back in the 1980s in Britain and little else. Which is a shame because it is a fascinating low budget psychodrama. The horror or slasher tag it is usually given is quite misleading and will no doubt disappoint hard core horror fans expecting quite a different kind of movie. Sure it does eventually lead to a violent climax but it is closer to being a character study of a man driven to insanity by his squalid, and increasingly anarchic urban environment. Almost like a bargain basement 'Taxi Driver' with some CBGBs era atmosphere thrown in. Along with Uli Lommel's little seen 'Blank Generation' there are very few other films that successfully document the mid 70s NYC punk scene of The Ramones, Patti Smith, Richard Hell, The Cramps et al, and 'The Driller Killer' is worth viewing for this reason alone.

Ferrara himself plays the lead character, tortured scumbag artist Reno. In his later, more sophisticated, and yes, better movies this role would no doubt have been played by someone like Keitel, Walken, Hopper or Gallo. Ferrara doesn't have the acting chops these guys have and so the movie suffers somewhat, but even so, his performance is crude but effective. Unknowns Carolyn Marz and Baybi Day as his girlfriend and his girlfriend's girlfriend respectively are both more than adequate, and The Roosters may be second rate but help lend some authentic punk rock feel to this underrated slice of urban nihilism. While by no means my favourite Abel Ferrara movie, this movie doesn't deserve to be dismissed. I like it.

"This film should be played LOUD," insists the pre-credits card at the beginning. And not simply to feel the full force of The Roosters, or the squeal of the titular murder weapon, but also because Abel Ferrara's zero-budget slasher is all about anger in need of expression.

Ferrara himself plays Reno, a struggling artist desperate to complete a painting that will earn him enough to pay the rent. He lives with a couple of girls, one of whom is kind of his girlfriend but neither of whom particularly likes him, and he's being driven mad by those damn Roosters downstairs. All his repressed rage and his inability to empathise with fellow humans is taking its toll. Then he sees his release: take it out on the New York homeless using a power drill and a Porto-Pak(TM).

Reno's disgust of transient men betrays a profound male anxiety: the inability to provide. Furthermore, his "masterpiece" is a painting of a bison – both a icon of masculine power as well as a symbol of hunter-gatherer sustenance. He barks impotently at his indifferent girlfriend, who later turns to their female flatmate for her physical satisfaction.

Moreover, Reno is unable to communicate with his artist peers. Even the members of the band who aren't musicians are full of extrovert self-expression. Reno, meanwhile, is a wholly internalised recluse, harbouring a growing loathing of other people.

Then there's Dalton Briggs (Harry Schlutz II), a gallery owner who, like a Roman emperor, holds the power to give a thumbs-up or down to Reno's future. In the deliberately theatrical Dalton scenes (a realist style is employed elsewhere) Ferrara scores with Clockwork Orange- style electronic classical music; and indeed there is a hint of Kubrickian absurdity in the juxtaposition between Briggs' high art pretensions and Reno's degenerate world.

That world, shot on location around Ferrara's own haunt, is at times as potent a snapshot of post-Vietnam New York's underbelly as Scorsese's Taxi Driver. The depiction of madness and desperation amongst the homeless is pretty broad, although it doesn't stray into the sort of farcical territory we would later see in J. Michael Muro's Street Trash.

The Driller Killer is one of the original "video nasties" – a select group of films banned from UK home video in the 1980s for fear of corrupting malleable minds. Apparently, the complaints were based solely on the poster, depicting the famous head drill victim. To be fair, the actual content here more than lives up to that marketing promise. This is a grotty and gory film, the cheapness of whose effects is offset by being shot mostly at night.

Smart directorial choices, neat editing, dark humour, and a unique setting elevate The Driller Killer above many of the slashers of the late-70s/early-80s period. It may not be the most fun – think of the intense grimness of Maniac or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer – but it's surely one of the more memorable.