The Driller Killer (1979)

An artist slowly goes insane while struggling to pay his bills, work on his paintings, and care for his two female roommates, which leads him taking to the streets of New York after dark and randomly killing derelicts with a power drill. 

The Driller Killer is a 1979 horror film directed by and starring Abel Ferrara. It was on a list of banned so-called video nasties in the United Kingdom.  When you look at the name of the film you immediately think it's a slasher film.  It has violent finish but it is closer to being a character study of a man driven to insanity by his squalid, and increasingly anarchic urban environment.  It's more of a social drama about life in the big city than it is a horror shocker. 

It follows Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara) as a struggling painter.  He's painting a picture of a big fucking buffalo for some reason and dude is always angry and irate.  He owes money to everybody and argues with everybody he meets.  His two roommates, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and Pamela (Baybi Day) both spend his money, cover his bills, and take rather erotic showers together.  A punk band moves in next door and drive him crazy with practicing day and night.  They are god awful.  Reno then goes out and buys a drill and proceeds to kill homeless bums with it.  The music is so terrible I almost went out and bought a drill.  Reno then moves on to using the drill on others and it leads to the violent climax of the film.

I told you I'd get you the rent.

The Driller Killer was originally banned as a "video nasty" because of the notoriety it gained for it's cover art, as opposed to it's content.  Ferrara's use of deep red in the film was particularly striking, the red symbolising Reno's ever-growing rage with life from the outset; a character driven to extreme anger out of the pressures of urban life, who then kills homeless `bums' out of a fear that one day he too will become like them.  We are frequently shown religious icons of varying sorts and I'm not sure why.  There are really no other religious overtones to this movie that I could see.

The acting is on the low-budget side. But there's something about the Driller Killer that works, almost in spite of itself.  This film really documents the village punk circuit at the end of the 1970's.  The hand-held mingling with the street people of the period shows how filthy NYC was at the time.  Overall, the Driller Killer is a creative and inventive insight into insanity. It's not a masterpiece like some movies that deal with a similar theme, such as Taxi Driver, but it a very good movie and recommended to fans of shock cinema.

The stupid fucking buffalo painting.

 Trivia:

Abel Ferrara claims that half of this movie was shot in 1978 and the other half was shot in 1979. This explains why the actors hair styles and looks in general change quite frequently during the movie. 

Title is mentioned in the song "Nasty" by The Damned - a song about horror movies that were banned in the U.K. after the Video Recording Act of 1984.

Abel Ferrara claims that the black guy cleaning the taxi cab windscreen near the beginning of the film was Bruce Willis. 

Could have easily escaped the UK 'video nasty' list if the original pre-VRA video cover wasn't so graphic. it featured a very bloody close-up of a drill boring into a man's head with lots of blood. The video cover was featured in video catalogues and received many complaints.

James O'Hara's final film.