Reviewed By-Sean
Patrick Dolan
Director: Abel Ferrara
Cast: Abel Ferrara, Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Schultz, Alan
Wynroth, Richard Howorth
Reno Miller (Abel Ferrara) is a struggling artist, a painter, living in a New
York hellhole apartment with his girlfriend Carol (Carolyn Marz) and her friend
Pamela (Baybi Day). Reno and friends are two months behind on the rent,
and can't even afford to go out to the clubs or buy drugs. Reno's art
patron, a rich "uptown fag", refuses to advance him anymore money
until he delivers his latest "masterpiece", a portrait of a fierce
looking bull. Tension mounts as Reno argues with Carol and can't work,
cannot even think, over the noise of the new tenants downstairs, a punk rock
band who call themselves the "Roosters". He walks the streets at
night, trying to strike up conversations with winos passed out in the street,
and soon begins hallucinating- violent images of him killing people with a power
drill (made portable with a battery pack, in case you wondered). Of
course, it isn't long before thought becomes deed.
Reno's nocturnal killing spree, including an extremely prolific night where he
drills nearly a dozen of the city's destitute and dispossessed after finding
that he can no longer enjoy a night of simple pleasures (beer and the punk rock
stylings of the Roosters at a local club) proves to be very therapeutic at
first. The next day he wakes up with a ravenous appetite and not only
finishes his long overdue painting of the bull, but also completes a portrait of
Roosters' lead singer/guitarist Tony Coca-Cola for the princely sum of $500.
But when he shows the bull painting to his art dealer, things turn ugly.
The man insults and ridicules his work, calling it "lifeless",
"devoid of passion", "a work of pure egotism", and
"worthless". Sensing that the good times are over,
Carol leaves Reno and returns to her ex-husband, Stephen. This is the
final straw, and Reno completely snaps. He lures the art dealer to his
apartment with the implied promise of some man-on-man sex and then gets his
bloody revenge. All that is left is to finish off Carol and Stephen . . .
This is an atmospheric look at NYC in the pre Rudy Guiliani/Disney buyout days,
when the city still had a reputation as a crime ridden cesspool of human waste.
Ferrara lovingly documents the squalor of the artists' lofts and the city's
"night life", with an impressive scene of a vagrant puking on himself
before he passes out. The action starts late in this film, with the first
murder occurring around the halfway (42 minute mark), and way too much time is
spent here on the rehearsals of the punk rock band "the Roosters".
After a few of the Roosters' tunes, most viewers will choose to ignore the
suggestion that precedes the film's opening credits- "This film should
be played LOUD". There is a brief lesbian shower scene thrown in,
which isn't too provocative, and an unintentionally funny scene of Reno stabbing
and hacking a rabbit carcass to death (a gift form the building's super, who
feels sorry for the poor kids) as a precursor to his homicidal madness also
falls flat. The movie is actually pretty much devoid of humor, aside from
a conversation between Reno and Pamela in which she gives him the following
advice on how to deal with the homosexual art dealer- "You should let him
stick it up your ass once. Use KY Jelly, it won't hurt!" All in
all though, this film is not bad. It's low on graphic gore and cheaply
filmed, but the effect is to make it a more gritty and realistic look at the
punk rock culture of the late '70's than the glossy, romanticized versions
offered by films like Alex Cox's SID AND NANCY.
Abel Ferrara, still at a very early stage in his career, bravely cast himself in
the lead role as the struggling artist Reno in THE DRILLER KILLER. The
film is not without its flaws, but was a strong indication of what the young
director was capable of. Ferrara scored another cult hit with MS. 45
(1981), a rape/revenge film, but he didn't break through to the mainstream until
KING OF NEW YORK (1990), which starred Christopher Walken, a pre NYPD Blue
David Caruso, and Laurence Fishburne. One can see Ferrara's early
sensibilities at play in this film, as KING OF NEW YORK fetishized hip-hop/rap
music nearly as heavily as THE DRILLER KILLER did the punk rock scene. He
followed this strong showing with THE BAD LIEUTENANT (1992) starring Harvey
Keital, the modern vampire film THE ADDICTION (1995) and the Mafia
"family" drama THE FUNERAL (1996)- the latter two starring Walken
again. In 1998 he directed NEW ROSE HOTEL, a little known and rarely seen
sci-fi flick, an adaptation of a William Gibson story (JOHNNY MNEMONIC (1995),
X-Files episode, "The Kill Switch") starring the unlikely combination
of Walken and Asia Argento.
