Finding the art in the trash.
No one ever said poetry has to be pretty, art even less so, and somewhere in a piss-soaked alley in the Bronx, where sludge drips from pipes and sewage bubbles out of grates, lounging atop a heap of rotting trash, vomit-caked clothes, and blood-stained rags, with a crown of shattered liquor bottles atop his head, reigns New York’s No Wave prince,
Abel Ferrara. One of cinema’s great grime poets and connoisseurs of sleaze, for over four decades since the debut of his first non-pornographic feature,
The Driller Killer, Ferrara has shown a sincere passion for exhibiting deviant characters who exist in the seediest underbellies of society, and a bizarre and transgressive talent for drawing a sort of twisted beauty out of the filth, corruption, and moral apathy that surrounds them. The characters (and likely even the actors themselves) are drugged out or wasted. The atmosphere can’t be described as anything but sticky - drenched in every bodily fluid imaginable - and the settings look so pungent you can almost smell them wafting off the screen.
It’s revolting, but there’s a lyricality in Ferrara’s raw imagery and the organic way he lets scenes play out, and the film itself is a rare and fascinating artifact of New York’s short-lived
No Wave scene (which the plot revolves around). No Wave was an
experimental music and
art movement that rejected everything that commercial art stood for. The artists favored styles that were abrasive and dissonant, and subjects and themes that were controversial and inflammatory (e.g., there's a song in
The Driller Killer about what sounds like an incestuous
Bonnie and Clyde). Although the No Wave movement didn't become as big or notable
in film as it did in other art forms, with respect to aesthetic,
The Driller Killer can absolutely be considered an unofficial No Wave film, matching its style with its subject matter. These exact aspects – the authenticity; the artists unabashedly reveling in their own transgressions against social norms – are what gives this trashy
exploitation flick such a unique beauty.
In her book
Cutting Edge: Art-Horror and the Horrific Avant-garde, film professor and theorist Joan Hawkins argues that not only are “high art” and “low art” a lot closer than they appear, but the line between them is also thinner and blurrier than most people believe. She argues that during the latter half of the mid-20th century, many of the exploitation and horror films (as horror films have long been considered “low art”) from the United States would have been considered arthouse or avant-garde had they been made in Europe, and many of Europe’s arthouse films of that period would have been considered schlock in the United States. She makes this convincing case by comparing high and low art, showing that they have more commonalities than differences, notably their shared celebration of excess and notions of being boundary-pushing. Both art films and exploitation films are typically highly stylized with a deep focus on aesthetic, both value subversive content full of nudity and/or violence, and both are prone to freewheeling experimentation.
The Driller Killer checks all of these boxes, and I sincerely believe that this "
video nasty" proudly straddles the line between exploitation and art-horror (and also takes a leak on that line while guzzling a warm, stale 40 from a brown paper bag).
I’m still not done explaining why this purportedly throw-away movie is worth your time! I have an education in film theory myself, which largely entailed learning how to read subtext, and I’ll be goddamned if this movie isn’t low-key queer as hell. It has some of the most in-your-face homoerotic subtext I’ve ever seen (aside from the very blatant girl-on-girl shower scene). The story follows a struggling painter named Reno (played by Ferrara) as he works on an anticipated new piece for an art gallery. Already suffering from artist’s block, when a No Wave band with no lack of creativity and a flamboyant and fluid frontman moves into the apartment below his, Reno begins to unravel. He loses all interest in his girlfriend, who has the aforementioned sexual relationship with their female roommate, and he can’t seem to make a stroke on his painting. His artistic and sexual frustrations swell to explosive levels when he goes to see his downstairs neighbors' band perform live, and he subsequently relieves these seething tensions and finds an artistic rebirth by going on a killing spree with a power drill. He targets homeless men during this spree, where he often mounts the men, shoving his drill in and out of them, and the killings climax in geysers of blood erupting out of the men’s open wounds, occasionally spraying across Reno’s ecstatic face and shuddering body. To repeat that all, he’s out on the streets, euphorically “drilling” (quotes in case the innuendo isn’t clear enough yet) random dudes, in acts that end with bodily fluids spurting out of the men. I did mention that Ferrara began his career directing porn, right? That’s rhetorical, I know I did. Whether intentional or not (the fun part about subtext is that it doesn’t have to be intentional to be there), the murder scenes read as explicitly sexual, and the movie reads like an allegorical tale of a man coming out, or at the very least fully discovering his own sexuality.
The Driller Killer is an absolutely wild ride, bursting with a grotesque style of artistry that’s underappreciated and easily overlooked due to its surface-level repulsiveness. It’s trash-art horror at its finest, a brilliant blend of the high and the low, and one of the standout exploitation films from the U.S. during the 1970s. If that's not enough for you, the lead singer of the band is named Tony Coca-Cola. What more do you want!?
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