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.
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Overrated and overhyped
Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.
A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."
If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.
This little clunker actually proves that with the right cover artwork at the right time you too can have a career in film making ... Driller Killler was one of the original videos that caused Britain to loose its sanity again and created the video nasty craze ... You either know what that is or you don't, but it caused ripples worldwide and catapulted a few great films and a lot more awful films into the spotlite ... Of course the idiots that created this silly unthoughtout farce would turn in their grave if they realised that their pointless interfering caused the exact opposite effect that they wanted it to ... Spin faster and suffer you idiots :)) ... Everyone wanted to see the films after these fools started promoting them ... Driller Killer was there much more due to its eye catching cover than any content ... Amateur ( nothing wrong with that ) but unexciting and not of any interest to most people, it launched the career of Abel Ferrara, who continues to churn out mediocre trash to this day
I noticed that several reviewers gave "The Driller Killer" scores of 10 and with rave reviews. I just don't get it...aside from being bold, I can't think of a single thing I liked about this one.The story is about a schizophrenic artist who slips over the edge to total insanity. When he flips, he runs about town at night using a power drill on hobos who happen to be there. You see lots of footage of him shoving the drill into their chest, head, etc. along with fake blood and screams...all in the name of his art. The project was directed and stars Abel Ferrara...and it was a complete mess. I hope his later projects were better...perhaps this was just a learning opportunity and he learned and honed his craft. But the film abounded with lots of terrible acting (particularly by the one-time film actress who played Pamela. None of the others were good...she was unbelievably bad. Had she done more films, she could perhaps make a claim for one of the worst actresses ever! It was THAT bad. Additionally the editing, pacing and script were pretty awful. Nothing about it was good...other than just the shock value of the plot. And, some might enjoy the lesbian sex scenes...at least the acting in those wasn't too bad.
Artist and house-mates struggle to make ends meet, band move in downstairs, tensions running high, nonsense. Video nasty from the late Seventies which really hasn't stood the test of time with most of the cast becoming annoying very quickly and it just sort of goes round in circles. Some of the film seems to be mostly a promotional vehicle for the band with a man losing his mind tacked on to the side and even when it does reach its crescendo it's disappointing. You could say it influenced later works like American Psycho but all in all it's quite a hard and unrewarding watch.
The version I saw (or tried to) was on The Horror Channel and for most of the time, I could not even make out what I was seeing, let alone relish in the supposed notorious gory 'video-nasty' bits. I might as well have not worn my spectacles (I'm strongly short-sighted) for the difference they would have made.Darkness came across as giant globules of pixelated olive green instead of black and it all must have been recorded with the microphones still in their boxes, as it's muffled, dull and horribly distorted.Any potential tension originally intended has long been evaporated by the sheer strain of trying to follow it, though the "story", such as it was, is trite, mostly domestic and very boring. It was only that the presumed promise that more vital drilling into live people would make watching further less of a chore that I didn't simply switch off.