Customer Reviews

Driller Killer

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This movie initially seemed to have a lot of promise in the slasher flick category. You have a guy quickly going crazy because of stress and punk rock. You have an early cordless drill. You have lots of people in a big city just waiting to be drilled. The guy quickly going crazy seems to be psychotic. This movie has everything for a recipe for fear and terror! I would not count on much fear and terror.

Reno Miller is an artist with a couple of live-in girlfriends, an obnoxious agent, and neighbors that like to practice their punk rock music when he wants to paint. Reno is under pressure to pay bills. In addition to the stress, at least one of his girlfriends is ditzy. The stress is driving Reno crazy, literally. One day, Reno uses an early cordless drill and starts to have visions. In a movie like this, you take one drill, add visions, and mayhem is sure to start, and it does. Reno soon practices his drilling technique on an array of people. So, is Reno an artist or a budding doctor with a drill? Trust me; Reno was much better at art than drill surgery. I consider what Reno did to that poor drill to be drill abuse.

Even though drill surgery without anesthetic sounds bloody, there was a surprisingly small amount of blood. On the other hand, that sort of special effect requires money and this movie seems like it was very low budget. Nor was there much excitement in this movie. In fact, much of the movie was devoted to the rock group next door or downstairs or wherever it was. It seems like the rock music was a substitute for an actual plot, of which there was too little. We did have some scenes that supposedly communicated Reno's descent into madness, but I thought the scenes were annoying and tedious.

Few movies have ventured into the sub-genre of cordless drill slasher films. Considering this movie, perhaps that is a good thing. It may be that this film has achieved cult status. I am not a member of the cult. I found this movie boring and uninspired. Reno was hardly a sympathetic character. The special effects were lacking. Even the sound and picture were lacking, with the sound muddy and the picture needing clean up.

Quite a number of good horror movies exist that are substantially superior to this one. Go watch one of those instead of this movie.

Good luck!

Initially I thought this would be good.

An artist flips out and runs around killing people in NYC because a punk rock band practices in his building all night long, day after day until he just can't take it anymore!! The problem is both the band and the artist are some of the most irritating characters to ever grace a bad film. Supposedly the film stars Abel Ferrara (?), but there's no such listing in the actual film credits.

Prepare to be annoyed.

It had been a couple of years since I saw this film and I have to admit time changes everything. This isn't a good movie at all. The only things it has going for it are the fact that it's Abel's directorial debut and he stars in it. Besides that, the two attractive women, and images of New York in the 70's, it's pretty bad. In some reviews and even on the back of the box it's compared with 'Taxi Driver'. That's B.S. because this film is nowhere near it. The film tells the story of Reno Miller (Jimmy Laine) a struggling artist living in a loft with his two gal pals Pamela (Baybi Day) and Carol (Carolyn Marz). Reno is putting the finishing touches on a painting of a buffalo which he's convinced is his masterpiece. Penniless and frustrated, he spends his days watching drunk winos vomiting in the streets. Things really get bad when a punk rock band called the Roosters move in above him. The lead singer, Tony Coca Cola, holds rehearsals at 2AM which pisses Reno off. Getting no help from his landlord he retaliates the only way he can: buying a porto pack from a hardware store and going out in the middle of the night with a power drill and massacring winos. Reno's mind starts to deteriorate when his art dealer hates his latest piece and Carol leaves him. Look, it's an exploitation film made for the drive in circuit so don't expect anything good. No, this film will be looked back on as the directorial debut of one of the biggest cult directors. For Ferrara fans it's something of a must see. The Cult Epics DVD release is exciting for a couple of reasons. For one the film is uncut and in widescreen. The picture is as cleaned up as it's going to get. This DVD also features Abel's first commentary. What can you say about Abel other than he's one of a kind. Love him or hate him, he is what he is. Usually that attitude makes his commentaries wild and unpredictable but this one's kind of a chore to get through. He isn't being interviewed like he was on 'King of New York' so he tends to wander and never finish his sentences. Abel said in an interview a couple of years ago that to him if a film is completed, if it gets made and released it's a success. Well, keeping his own maxim in mind this film finally gets a good DVD that proves it was made and it's out there now. You decide if it's successful.

The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979)

Abel Ferrara and Nicholas St. John have been working together for a long, long time. They'd been doing their thing for years on the indie and porn circuits before The Driller Killer, Ferrara's first feature film (and the first of many scripted by St. John) appeared. And yet somehow this movie still has all the hallmarks of a first film, without really having any of the strengths one expects.

Reno Miller (Ferrara) is an artist, living in Manhattan with two women, Carol and Pamela (Carolyn Marz and Baybi Day, neither of whom ever appeared in another film-- and with good reason). While on the surface this would seem to be every man's dream, Miller is struggling to pay the bills, and to make matters worse, the landlord has just rented the apartment upstairs to a horrible new wave band who practice at all hours of the night. In order to combat the stress, Miller does what any normal person would-- he starts carrying a portable power drill around with him and using it to randomly kill bums on the street.

I'm still trying to figure out why this film was cut for release (two minutes were shaved off for UK release). I haven't seen the cut version, but I'm guessing the majority of the cuts were made in the cheesecake scenes (Carolyn and Pamela are just as happy with one another as they are with Miller, a minor character feature that adds absolutely nothing to the film save a modicum of watchability during one or two of the slow bits) rather than the pedestrian, uninspiring violence (and it's not a time-frame thing; the movie came out a couple of weeks after Dawn of the Dead, shot on a similar shoestring budget, but with far more explicit, and everpresent, gore effects).

In all honesty, I think if this movie weren't known as the feature film debut of Abel Ferrara, it would have faded into well-deserved obscurity decades ago. And really, it's not worth hunting down. Ferrara and St. John got a lot better real quick. * ½