A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Friday, September 4, 2026

The Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979)

Abel Ferrara in The Driller Killer

Cast: Abel Ferrara, Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Schultz, Alan Wynroth, Maria Helhoski, James O'Hara, Richard Howorth, Louis Mascolo, Tommy Santora. Screenplay: Nicholas St. John. Cinematography: Ken Kelsch. Film editing: Bonnie Constant, Michael Constant, Abel Ferrara, Orlando Gallini, Veronika Rocket. Music: Joe Delia. 

Abel Ferrara isn't much of an actor, but he doesn't have to be in The Driller Killer, his grindhouse classic. He's not surrounded by people who can act, or even need to: All they have to do is show how intolerable life is in 1970s New York City. Ferrara (under the pseudonym Jimmy Laine) plays Reno Miller, an artist who lives in a rundown apartment with two women, Carol (Carolyn Marz) and Pamela (Baybi Day), who are more interested in each other than they are in him. When a punk band called the Roosters moves in next door and starts practicing at all hours, Reno flips out. He begins prowling the streets with an electric drill, using it to off any poor derelict who manages to come into his sights. Apart from one gruesome scene in which Reno drills into the forehead of a victim, it's less bloody than the slasher films it inspired, which may be why the producers chose to reproduce that scene in a notorious poster that got the movie banned, especially in the United Kingdom. Ferrara went on to hire better actors and find better scripts to create more convincing urban nightmares in King of New York (1990) and Bad Lieutenant (1992), so The Driller Killer is probably of interest mainly to students of his work and devotees of the genre. The minimal budget for the movie is evident throughout, but the coherence of its director's vision of an urban hellscape helps it transcend schlock.

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