Directed by Abel Ferrara
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.
Abel Ferrara Carolyn Marz Baybi Day Harry Schultz Alan Wynroth Maria Helhoski James O'Hara Richard Howorth Louis Mascolo Tommy Santora Rita Gooding Chuck Saaf Gary Cohen Janet Dailey Joyce Finney Butch Morris Paul Fitze John Fitze Karl Metner Chris Amato Rich Bokun Michael Canosa Greg Schirrira Thomas Baeza Frank Hazard John Paul McIntyre John Coulakis Lanny Taylor Peter Yellen Show All…
El asesino del taladro, Der Bohrmaschinenkiller, Killer (El asesino del taladro), Driller Killer, The Driller Killer - Der Bohrmaschinenkiller, A fúrógépes gyilkos, Ο Σχιζοφρενής Δολοφόνος με το Τρυπάνι, Убивця з електродрилем, 电钻杀手, O Assassino da Furadeira, Zabójca z wiertarką, 드릴러 킬러, ドリラー・キラー マンハッタンの連続猟奇殺人, 電鑽殺手
MexicoC 
USA 
JapanR18+ Japan Mexico USA 
Some gems from Abel Ferrara on the Arrow blu-ray commentary track:
He wants to direct a Jekyll and Hyde movie starring Forest Whitaker and 50 Cent?? "It would be Forest changing into 50. No one has ever done that movie. . . yet."
"Put the Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes in this package."
"Union Square. Andy Warhol would watch us out of a window."
A homeless man cleans a car windshield: "This was pre-Giuliani New York. These guys used to be everywhere, then one day they were just gone."
"This place (5th Avenue) looked like a Warsaw ghetto. Now? Are you kidding me."
"If I paid to see a movie called The Driller Killer, and this was it,…
More slashers should have their killers’ motivations tied into how annoying it is to live next to a punk band.
"you're becoming simply a technician. there's nothing there. there's no feeling, no drama, no passion. a work of pure, unadulterated ego."
70s economic and artistic frustration as a gutter slasher psychotic breakdown. an expression of rage that feels sordid and poisonous but also perversely cathartic—ferrara's acts of violence, the genre thrills themselves acting as an explosive break from the mundane horrors and impotence of his working-class ennui. i too think that landlords and bosses suck and homelessness shouldn't exist but i'm a bit less certain about the solution posed here lol.
Watched the Arrow Video blu-ray with commentary from Abel Ferrara himself, moderated by Brad Stevens. They've got a really nice anti-chemistry where you can tell Stevens is trying to get Ferrara to think critically about his own film while for his own part Ferrara has no interest in doing anything other that remembering what it was like to have sex in 1978. You might think that's a bummer but much like John Ford meeting Kurosawa and summing up his entire filmography by simply telling him "you sure like rain" there's an elegance to Ferrara watching himself drive a power drill into a man's skull and saying "man if you think this is normal you're fucked up." He's his own John Ford.
"I'll tell you what you know about paint, man!"
New York's homeless community finds out what happens when a painter with a drill, $19.95 for a cordless Porto-Pack and zero sleep loses this mind ... it's doesn't end well! (you didn't think it would did you?)
"You don't know nothing about paint, man!"
A sleazy slice of 70's New York pizza pie served up and stuffed down your throat by Chef Ferrara that has a sleazy n dirty punk rock feel to it you'll need a tetanus shot afterwards. This is also this movie that gave the world of D.I.Y. multiple uses for the cordless drill, obviously you could use it to put up shelves, but you could also use…
Artists must suffer for their art, that's why it's called painting.
It would be completely reasonable to pan this for being incomprehensible, badly paced, strangely acted, and indulgent, but in that confused, slow, awkward mess are a fair few moments of accidental (?) brilliance. Some of these moments are funny (like the pizza eating scene), some of them are visually intriguing (many, many scenes), and some of them are trashy slice-of-life moments that could make a wholly different but incredible film (the pinball moment comes to mind). That last is actually a pretty apt description of much of the first two-thirds of the film; the small fraction of it that that doesn't cover is a sort of avant garde psychological breakdown.
When the killing eventually starts (after a false start, even),…
Abel Ferrara, who directed hardcore porn before, delivers a dirty, gritty and gory trip somewhere between Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" and William Lustig's "Maniac". All three movies that were made in the late 70s / early 80s are united by the extremely hostile, cold and dirty New York atmosphere, which is also repellent and captivating here at the same time.
The insanely noisy soundscape, consisting of punk rock, hypnotically oppressive synth sounds and knocking industrial sound effects, is pure stress but in the most positive way.
Documentary street shots are followed by surreal-suggestive sequences of cuts, interspersed with equally intangible religious elements. Touching, human moments are followed by gory acts of violence, which culminates in an insanely brutal killing spree in which everyone and everything becomes a victim in the end.
There's an interesting rift between like actually people sleeping outside the building, just everywhere, on the fire escape outside your window. And artists who have to stay in and eat pizza instead of going out and doing drugs. I read a horror novel recently I thought would either be a lot like one I'm planning advantageously or not, and it really tries to paint an accurate picture of millennial aged crashing on a friend's couch poverty and I wondered if anyone will care about 'artist' version of that (as motive to stay in what is clearly a fucked up situation. In my case, it is ghosts, it is literally what it is teasing, but with a twist. But I want…
Thanks to WraithApe, Nine Lives, and Mr. Mocata's comment on Hollie Horror's NYC list, I finally got around to watching this and it was about as awesome as I expected.
Reno is a (very) struggling artist by day and a psychotic drill wielding killer by night. He kills mostly homeless people as an outlet to relieve his daily stress and I’m not saying I’d resort to that in his situation, but I am saying that I kinda understand it. Dude has a lot going on around him: bills piling up, an awful girlfriend who doesn’t really care about him at all, an agent who is constantly giving him the slip, nobody appreciates his art, people throw perfectly good NY-style pizza at him, and so on.…
Dalton Briggs: No, no, no, no. This isn't right. This is nothing. This is shit! Where's the impact? It's just a goddamn buffalo!
Yeah.. uhm.. spot on!
Okay, that's not entirely true. Driller Killer isn't shit (nor is it a buffalo). It's certainly a well made movie that's surprisingly good looking. It's just that it doesn't hit me anywhere near as hard as Ms. 45 or Bad Lieutenant did. Most of it left me kind of cold actually. Sure, the movie had some inspired moments (most notably the scene where Pamela discovers Dalton Briggs' body) but I feel the focus lies too much on extraneous stuff for me to work as a slasher/horror. I didn't feel any tension whatsoever. Also, Ferrara, the actor, couldn't convince me as a guy on the verge of snapping, at least not the way Joe Spinell did.
scared that every mutual's letterboxd review of this is "i related"
