It’s New
York in the late 1970s, a time of punk rock and garbage strikes, of Ed Koch and
Son of Sam, and what probably felt like
an endless spectacle of crime and murder in the streets. In the middle of this toxic city is Reno, a
scuffling artist who shares a grimy apartment with two women. He may love one,
or both. Then again, the two females seem to be lesbians. Or are they? The
bigger problem is that Reno can’t pay the bills. We get the sense that Reno is going
crazy. It may just be the sort of craziness that can happen to people in
pressure cooker environments like New York in the 1970s, or he could be going
full-bore movie crazy, as we’d expect a character to go in Abel Ferrara’s grim
masterpiece The Driller Killer. The beauty of it all, and what makes this movie
kind of artsy pop-trash classic, is that Reno manages to go both kinds of
crazy. And why not? It’s that sort of movie; part cinema verite look at city
psychosis, and part splatter flick. It’s like an arthouse movie made for the
drive-in crowd. Or, perhaps, a splatter film made by John Cassavetes.
What was
Ferrara thinking? He’s made a handful of interesting features since this
herky-jerky feature debut, but none were as full-on demented and hateful as the
tale of a struggling painter who finally loses his marbles and runs through the
city with a power drill, performing lobotomies and splenectomies on homeless
men. By the movie’s end, Reno is sporting a monster drill nearly as long as his
arm. A phallic fantasy? An answer to the massive gun fantasies in films like Taxi Driver and Dirty Harry? Just a blast of wishful thinking?
When you
watch The Driller Killer, you see a
hatred for New York in the 1970s that nearly leaks out of the screen. This isn’t Woody Allen’s New York, where
people while away their afternoons at foreign films, or on their analyst’s
couch. It’s not even Martin Scorsese’s New York, where well-dressed hoods eat
in fancy restaurants. This is a rock bottom view of the city, where a night’s
entertainment might include sitting around in your shithole apartment wishing
you had some drugs, or huddled in front of your barely working television set,
wondering if you’ll get through the program before the electric company shuts
you off. It’s where idiot musicians move into the apartment above yours and
pound out their stupid sounds until 3:00 AM, where the electric guitar shrieks
are so loud that they disturb the winos in the alley below.
What I
sense is that Ferrara knew this hate firsthand. Though he didn’t
write the screenplay (it was written by frequent Ferrara collaborator Nicholas
St. John), he nailed the anxiety and rage, captured by a weird motif that
appears three or four times in the film, that of Reno (played by Ferrara under
an alias) shaking his head and howling under what looks like a shower of blood.
It’s the kind of fury we feel in dreams.
Certainly
The Driller Killer is a portrait of a
person being whittled to a nub by his environment. Reno can’t escape. Even in
the safety of his apartment, he’s forced
to listen to his roommate reading nasty newspaper articles about people throwing
dogs into microwave ovens where they blow up. When Reno ventures outside, he
sees nothing but homeless men and old drunks puking in the street. (Early in
the film he has an encounter in a church with a an old homeless man who seems
to be Reno’s father. Does Reno fear becoming a drooling derelict like his dad?)
The ruined men in the neighborhood may provide a
kind of echo for what’s in Reno’s mind. One strikes up a conversation and asks
“Are you having woman problems?” Another has an argument with an imagined
father figure. Reno kills both.
Reno
doesn’t seem especially concerned about being caught, even after he’s killed a
dozen or so people. He slips around the city, his drill powered by a special
battery pack he saw advertised on television, and simply picks out random
victims. There’s so much crime and death in the area that a few dead winos
won’t even be missed. There’s no climactic showdown with the cops, and no last minute
confession from Reno about why he kills. Not that we see, anyway. All we know
is that Reno’s murderous side has been unleashed, and in the cesspool that is
1970s New York, he’ll keep going until he runs out of drill bits.
The
movie is cheaply made, but that’s an asset. The hand-held shooting style, the
authentic New York backgrounds, the squalid streets and alleys, feel lifelike,
as if we’re watching a 1970s No-Wave version of Italian neo-realism. The cast,
too, is fascinating. The performers seem to be a mix of real actors and real
winos. Scenes at a rock club feel as desolate and mean as what we’ve seen in
documentary footage of those times. Some of the acting is bad in a 1960s Roger
Corman way, but some of it is surprisingly moving. The winos being murdered,
for instance, are unexpectedly sympathetic, far more so than any of the
screaming females who’ve been hacked to death in hundreds of lesser movies.
Ferrara
is gripping as Reno. Thin, hatchet faced, on edge, he’s boiling over from the
first moment we see him. Almost stealing the show, though, is an actor listed
as Rhodney Montreal. He plays Tony Coca-Cola, one of the
punk rock goons upstairs. He’s actually D.A. Metrov, who later went on to write
and direct his own short films. As Tony, he avoids every rock cliché and
creates a unique, memorable persona. I wish every actor playing a rocker would
watch Metrov as Tony Coca-Cola, just to help blow the usual formula out of
their heads. Though
the majority of the cast had never acted in anything else (and would never act
again), one fellow, James O’Hara, was a veteran character actor who had
appeared in films dating back to John Ford’s The Quiet Man. He must have been the company pro. But like most of
his cast mates, O’Hara never acted again.
The Driller
Killer gained some notoriety in the 1980s when it was banned in
the U.K. as part of their “video nasties” witch hunt, when distributors
objected to what was a very graphic video box cover. But how else can you sell
this movie, if not with a close-up of a drill boring into a man’s head? In 1983 European Parliament members were subject to a 20 minute sequence of scenes from films like The Driller Killer, Cannibal Holocaust, and I Spit on Your Grave, put together by British conservative Richard Simmons in an effort to stop the sale of extremely violent videos. Simmons got his wish, and thousands of VHS tapes were confiscated from UK stores. That Ferrara's film was far better (and not half as disgusting) as those other titles was apparently not part of the discussion. The movie was
banned in England until 1999, a full two decades after its first
release. Still, it became a minor cult favorite, regarded by some as one of the films
that kicked off the splatter film boom of the ‘80s. You might say The Driller Killer is to splatter movies
what Iggy Pop is to punk.
Ferrara has since gone on to direct movies about
vampires, mobsters, Kung-Fu killers, and corrupt cops, while New York remains
his milieu. He has become a better director since The Driller Killer, but I don’t know if he’s made a better movie.
He still likes to challenge the status quo – his most recent film was an
account of the last day of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, with Willem
Dafoe in the title role – but he’s moved on to more mature subjects, leaving
the strangeness of The Driller Killer
behind, back in the 1970s where it belongs, I guess.
And what
a strange movie it is, from its opening warning that “This Film Should Be
Played Loud,” to the final tongue in cheek dedication to the people of New
York. This movie wasn’t made to create a franchise, or inspire “driller killer”
Halloween costumes, and it didn’t come out of a studio pitch meeting where a
committee determined if it would appeal to a mass audience. So where did it
come from? Abel Ferrara’s troubled mind, perhaps. Or Hell itself.
- Don Stradley
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