Review of The Driller Killer (1979) by James C — 29 Dec 2008

Ferrara's first mainstream film is probably best known for getting mixed up in the Video Nasty controversy in the early 1980s in the UK. It was clearly financed and commercially released to cash in on the success of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but Driller Killer is rather more than another Toolbox Murders. Alongside the slasher horrors of drilled and slaughtered people, there's some visionary content on how far the urban American environment had descended from a rural ideal of men working the land and worshipping the Lord.

Ferrara plays Reno, a frustrated artist living in downtown New York. He's working on what he thinks will be his masterpiece and a real earner - a portrait of a buffalo. But he has money problems, woman problems and environmental problems - a punk rock band is using the downstairs apartment to practise in, making it nigh on impossible for Reno to work. It all gets too much for our highly strung hero, and he progresses from general cussing and arguing to taking a power drill out on the streets and murdering the homeless bums who litter the area. When Reno's gay art dealer sees the buffalo, he rejects it as a worthless thing, and so gets the drill himself. Eventually Reno turns it against the girlfriend who has gone back to her former bourgeois husband.

The film doesn't so much as analyse Reno's psychotic state as soak the viewer in it. The dilapidated area and its denizens is dwelt upon in an unhealthy fashion, the punk music pounds relentlessly and the characters are manifest forms of creep. The eye of the buffalo stares at Reno and us, accusingly, tauntingly reminding us of a far away mythic America, where Buffalo roamed across the plain and men were free, an idea which makes the things we see all the more ironic. The film's inciting incident, if it can be said to have one, shows Reno going to church where an ancient white-beard who supposedly has Reno's number is mumbling incantations about "forgiveness of sins." He reaches out for Reno with the world "son" and Reno reacts badly, rejecting the old man and his message. Demons begin to plague Reno and he's soon on his drilling spree. The idea seems to be that, in rejecting the religion of a God of mercy, Reno has fallen back on romantic visions of an America that never was (the twee and accusing buffalo) and when reality falls short, he punishes reality.

Driller Killer owes a debt to Scorsese' Taxi Driver, with its vision of urban New York as hell, but also hearkens back to Scorsese' own influences - there's a shot of Reno standing alone on a road bleeding the reflection of green neon which looks like something out of Powell's Peeping Tom. Every shot of the film is interesting from a point of view of colour (shocks of red predominate) and lighting; its also aurally assaulting in intriguing ways - the special edition DVD advises us to "play loud" and the film is best experienced blasting the viewer.

The film can be criticised of being derivative, or slightly confused. It loses momentum 50 minutes or so in, and whilst Reno's descent makes sense as a symbol, it isn't sufficiently motivated for a film which pretends to realism. Ferrara is not going to be to everyone's taste as a lead actor: he looks like Roger Daltry in Tommy, speaks like mid-60s Dylan and carries an attitude designed to hack-off even the most understanding viewer. But the film isn't an enlightenment exercise, it's an affective descent into a maelstrom of nastiness, an immersion in what the director and writer see (and continued to see in their later films) as an America which has gone to the devil. Ferrara should be applauded for taking an exploitation genre and doing something genuinely original and daring with it, and in the process giving the audience a cranked-up loud, blood-soaked and crazy vision of a contemporary hell.