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The unbear­able inten­si­ty of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer

28 Nov 2016

Words by Anton Bitel

A person with curly, dishevelled hair, illuminated by a red light, set against a textured red background.
A person with curly, dishevelled hair, illuminated by a red light, set against a textured red background.
A trou­bled man cracks under immense pres­sure in the director’s cult 1976 thriller.

The title alone of Abel Ferrara’s The Driller Killer was enough to get it on the Video Nas­ties list, at a time when VHS copies of Samuel Fuller’s World War Two dra­ma The Big Red One were briefly being seized by Man­ches­ter Police owing to someone’s (hilar­i­ous) mis­read­ing of that title. Or per­haps it was the lurid poster image – of a drill bit blood­i­ly pen­e­trat­ing a man’s fore­head – that seemed ful­ly to con­firm the promise of Ferrara’s title.

It’s true: The Driller Killer is essen­tial­ly con­cerned with a man, Reno Miller (played by Fer­rara him­self, under the pseu­do­nym Jim­my Laine), who goes on a mur­der­ous ram­page with a drill pow­ered by his Por­ta-Pak belt. Yet it is so much more than that, and an apt fea­ture debut (if one is pre­pared to over­look Ferrara’s 1976 porno 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy) for this most dif­fi­cult and elu­sive of filmmakers.

The film opens in dis­ori­ent­ing fash­ion. In a church, after being con­front­ed with a red-lit cru­ci­fix, Reno approach­es an old, long-beard­ed man who touch­es his hand. Reno flees in ter­ror with his girl­friend Car­ol (Car­olyn Marz) to a New York cab, where we learn that the old man, a com­plete stranger, had a piece of paper in his pock­et with Reno’s name and num­ber writ­ten on it. The nun said it could have been a rel­a­tive or some­thing,” Car­ol com­ments, You nev­er knew your father…” – but Reno insists that the man was mere­ly some fuck­ing degen­er­ate bum wino.”

It’s a mys­te­ri­ous open­ing, reveal­ing Reno’s root­less­ness while also fram­ing his cri­sis of iden­ti­ty in overt­ly reli­gious terms. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, most of Reno’s vic­tims will not be the nubile co-eds that typ­i­cal­ly die in slash­ers, but rather the home­less, dip­so­ma­ni­ac, mad males who were then pop­u­lat­ing New York’s side­walks and alleys (a vis­i­ble news­pa­per head­line in the film reads: State aban­dons men­tal­ly ill to city’s streets”). When Reno kills these mar­gin­alised men, by the­mat­ic asso­ci­a­tion he is also lash­ing out against his absent father, against God, and against himself.

Reno is also a strug­gling, impov­er­ished artist. Liv­ing in an apart­ment on Union Square (where Fer­rara also lived at the time) with Car­ol and her some­time girl­friend Pamela (Bay­bi Day) and faced with mount­ing bills and an evic­tion notice, he works spo­rad­i­cal­ly on his lat­est paint­ing (of a blood-streaked buf­fa­lo), aware that if it fails to sat­is­fy the gay art deal­er Dal­ton Brig­gs (Har­ry Schultz), his ménage à trois will be turned out onto the streets – where Reno would not be so very dif­fer­ent from the degen­er­ate bum winos he so despis­es and fears.

Reno is sur­round­ed by vio­lence – not just the news­pa­per arti­cles about deranged killers that Car­ol dis­cuss­es, but also a stab­bing in the park (the victim’s side, like Jesus’, pierced) that Reno wit­ness­es him­self. He is a man under a lot of pres­sure – and per­haps the final straw is when No Wave band The Roost­ers – with their gen­der-bend­ing singer Tony Coca-Cola (DA Metrov, cred­it­ed as Rhodey Mon­tréal, and prac­ti­cal­ly play­ing him­self) move into the apart­ment down­stairs and rehearse all day and night long.

So sure, The Driller Killer is a slash­er in which a trou­bled man cracks under immense pres­sure and gives vent to his rage in a mur­der spree – but it is also all at once a (self-reflex­ive) por­trait of an artist whose cre­ative tem­pera­ment is realised as a sort of pas­sion play, and a scuzzy, street-lev­el panora­ma of con­tem­po­rary Bow­ery Bohemi­an­ism. These admix­tures of high and low, of sub­lime art and gut­ter trash, of soar­ing cre­ativ­i­ty and filthy lucre, are under­scored by a sound­track that jux­ta­pos­es Joseph Delia’s elec­tron­ic cov­ers of Bach to the Roost­ers’ rau­cous punk. It is a the­mat­i­cal­ly dense, mess­i­ly ground­ed film which, although about a drill, nev­er bores – and there is noth­ing else quite like it.

The Driller Killer is released by Arrow Video on Dual-For­mat DVD/Blu-ray on 28 November.

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