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The Driller Killer (1979)

Dir: Abel Ferrara

Reno (Director Ferrara using the acting alias Jimmy Laine) is a semi-successful artist who lives with his girlfriend Carol (Carolyn Marz) in a rundown apartment building. Reno is working on his latest painting for his art dealer Dalton Briggs (Harry Schultz), but it's taking time and the money has run out.

With their friend (and Carol's sometimes lover) Pamela (Baybi Day) they scrape a life together that consists of cheap food, drugs, drink and constant arguments as Reno slowly loses grip on his sanity.

Things become even more strained when a drugged up Punk rock band move into the building and rehearse day and night, their music grating away on Reno's nerves as he struggles to complete the painting.

As his relationship with Carol starts to fall apart, Reno (who is now hallucinating) buys a battery pack for his drill and proceeds to roam the nighted New York streets, drilling the local derelicts to death…….

 

Far from a true horror film, Ferrara's "The Driller Killer" is more a character study of various inhabitants of one of New York's rundown districts during the late 70's (actually filmed between 1977/78), with the main character being Reno.
But Ferrara and his writer Nicholas St John (who would go on to create with Ferrara the excellent "Ms.45"and the classic that is "King of New York"), also spend time in fleshing out the other characters that surround Reno.
It's this scripting that actually makes "The Driller Killer" more art house than butchers' shop. The driller killings are presented as just another mad episode in Reno's fraught existence, just as much as the Punk band, the fights with his girlfriend and landlord and his strained relationship with the homosexual Mr Briggs.

That we spend so much time with the band (who are basically just there to make noise to help push Reno over the edge) shows that Ferrara wants this to be a study of a group of characters and not simply another psycho on the loose movie.
It's a grime-coated look at a group of people at a very turbulent time in New York's history. Many areas of the City had become rundown, crime filled, vice filled and drug drenched.
Squalor and it's stench would creep through whole areas of the City as New York fed on itself before vomiting the contents of it's concrete belly back up.
And yet these were areas and times that contained a vibrant artistic energy, it was a time for people to express themselves and push themselves. Intense and unique music, movies, art and literature would be grown in New York's self-made manure.
Soon AIDS would ravage the inhabitants of these neighbourhoods, destroying the wino, the artist, the singer, the whore, the hustler and the film maker with equal savagery.
And Ferrara captures this present and looming future with a warped, if supremely self-indulgent eye.

And it's this off beat approach to the 'psycho' films that makes "The Driller Killer" such a disappointment to a lot of viewers.
Those expecting a slasher gore fest will be heavily let down. This is a straight (if bizarre) drama that just happens to contain a few sequences of intense bloodletting.
Too much time is spent on the band playing and generally hanging out with each other and their groupies. These scenes of stoned, drunk and tripping characters (all played by friends, and acquaintances of Ferrara) are certainly a time capsule of the 70's social drop out but they become tiresome very quickly.
As does a lot of the dialogue from the bands leader Tony Coca-Cola (Rhodney Montreal, the seriously unhinged real life artist who provides the striking paintings that Reno as meant to have painted), which consists of a lot of tripping psycho babble.

But there are still many things to enjoy here.
The acting is actually pretty good and certainly suited to the films style. Ferrara does a slightly cliched wacko turn, but does have some strong scenes, especially when he verbally lashes out at Carol for daring to say the painting looks finished. It's a superb, realistically delivered rant, and overall the almost non-stop insanity of the character is well handled.

Montreal is pretty much a ham and Baybi Day (a Woman with a striking sexual allure who Ferrara, in the DVD's truly weird, tragic but psychologically enlightening commentary, admits to being obsessed with at the time) is either wonderful or just plain acting herself as the forever drugged up girl who is stuck in the middle of Reno's conflict with her lover Carol.
But it's actually Marz who stands out after Ferarra. As the mysterious partner/lover of Reno (the only one who ever has the slightest bit of money and who dresses and acts like she has known a better life and is just slumming it with the psychotic artist for whatever bizarre personal reason - we do learn she has a 'normal', comfortably off ex Husband) she plays off Ferrara very well. She is a striking Woman as well and Ferrara gives her many flattering set-ups. Her beauty makes the contrast between the character and the character's currant lifestyle stand out even more. She seems to be a lowlife junkie getting a fix of dirt to contrast her well to do life. And yet she does go through a lot of hardships by staying with Reno and seems to have stuck it out for a long time.

The music by Ferrara regular Joe Delia is a wall of electronic noise, is very much of it's time but suitably effective for the visual style of the movie. The songs by the actual group (named 'Tony Coca-Cola and The Roosters') and co-written by Ferrara are suitably grating and free form, but again fit perfectly with the film.

Ferrara and his cinematographer Ken Kelsch (again a regular of Ferrara's, and who would go on to shoot the excellent "Bad Lt") capture the feel of the street s and the time perfectly. Be it the fictional set ups or the wonderful, on the run, location shooting, the film looks as skuzzy as the characters that inhabit it.

The gore effects are simple, but highly effective and the blood splattered drill deaths are pulled of with gritty aplomb.
Which I suppose brings us to the violence.
"The Driller Killer" does indeed contain some strong, if brief and well spread apart, murders. The first killing as Reno rides the bucking torso of the tramp (one of the many sexual metaphors in the film, where Reno's sexuality and sex life is abstractly highlighted) as he pushes the drill into his chest is a blood-spraying slice of ultra violence.
Another standout death is that of a ranting, disturbed man (wonderfully deranged playing by Peter Yellen, "Ms.45") who gets the drill in his back bucks as the bit bites in, blood flowing over the power tool and Reno's hands.

The most infamous killing though (and the scene that was used as the cover for the ill-fated UK video release in the early 80's where this, along with "Snuff", "The Evil Dead", "Cannibal Holocaust" and "SS Experiment Camp", was perhaps the most notorious of the 'Video Nasties'….and indeed "Driller Killer" remained banned in the UK until 1999 and was only released fully uncut in 2002) is when a tramp gets the drill pushed into his forehead. Even today this is still a delightfully up-front bit of nastiness and is at the very least a more than passable effect, especially considering the movies $45,000 budget.

So what do we have?
Neither fish nor fowl. A splatter film that takes perhaps too long to deliver the splatter and a 'serious' character study compromised by technical flaws and slightly too much self-indulgence.
And yet somehow it works. It works better with alcohol or whatever is your weapon of choice, but it still works.
At the very least it's a brave try at making a Grindhouse exploitation flick with a deeper, if psychologically blurred, meaning and with some kind of 'artistic' credibility.

To put it bluntly, Ferrara is one of the few Director's around today that makes Grindhouse orientated movies, be it in style, budget or a mixture of both, designed to get a proper cinema release. Even bigger budgeted films in his hands play like they crawled out of the local flea-pit, hungover, tripping, with a crotch itch and a hard-on. And that's something, and someone, to be cherished.