Video Nasty #4 : Driller Killer

Synopsis - Reno lives with his girlfriend and her other lover in a dilapidated apartment building in New York. He's been working on his masterpiece for sometime, inexplicably a painting of a giant buffalo, whilst his partner makes ends meet. His emasculation, the failure of his art and the success of those less talented then him heat the slow boil of Reno's rage until he finally snaps and in a fit of insanity takes to the streets to kill the very people he is fearful of becoming, the homeless.

In 2010 i'm attempting to watch and review all of the films on the DPP Video Nasty list. Click here for an explanation.

Driller Killer is a hard film to classify. Its aesthetic is too grimey and cheap to be classed as an art house movie, but it's too ambitious and difficult to be labelled a slasher film. After all, no one is killed until fifty minutes into its relatively short running time and of those who do succumb to Reno's Black and Decker (11 by my count), not one is a woman. With that said, the film doesn't pull its punches when it comes to gore which matches the best (or should that be worst?) nasties.


There's never really an explanation as to Reno's weapon of choice. Maybe it's a phallic symbol, a desperate assertion of his dwindling masculinity. After all, his girlfriend not only supports him financially but also has to turn to another women to fulfill her carnal needs. Or maybe he chose the drill because it makes a cool noise and requires very little effort on his part. After all, killing ten people in one night with a knife would be exhausting. Whatever the reason, when Reno sees a portable power supply advertised on television his eyes light up. One can only assume his previous killing efforts could only happen within a two metre radius of a plug.

The killings are surprisingly unsettling and perfectly timed. The camera will linger on a vagrant shuffling along just long enough for the viewer to relax, at which point Reno will come sprinting into frame, jamming his drill into the poor victim's chest. These mostly bloodless kills are pretty shocking due to their sheer ferociousness. Well, they were until I realised that they reminded me of the scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail where Sir Lancelot is slowly advancing towards two guards only to suddenly appear and stab them. As soon as I'd made the Python connection I couldn't help but giggle whenever the killer came flying in to the shot.

Other than the fact that the film's called Driller Killer (a title which I can't help but think was meant to be funny), there's one scene in particular that got the film on the DPP list; a quite nasty prolonged shot of Remi giving a 6mm frontal lobotomy to a suprisingly static tramp. He doesn't even finish the job off with a Rawl plug, which in my opinion is sloppy workmanship. A still of this scene was the cover of the original VHS cover, providing the final screw in Driller Killer's DPP coffin.

One thing the film does particularly well is capture the sleazyness of New York in the 70s. Aside from the odd synth, the film is mostly soundtracked by 'Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters', a shitty punk band (aren't they all?) who live in the flat above Reno and sound oddly like The Kings of Leon. There are numerous uncut full performances by the band, providing little apart from boredom and irritation. Driller Killer opens with the text 'This film should be played loud'. Maybe the director wanted us to be driven as mad by the crappy music as Reno was? If so, it worked.


For most of the viewing I was unsure of what to make of the film, I was struggling to understand if the filmmaker had something interesting to say, or the dialog was just foreplay to Reno's power tool penetration (I promise i'll not mention my phallic symbolism theory again). Any doubts I had were quelled by the final scene. The director applies remarkable restraint when a normal horror hack would of exploited the situation for all it is worth. The film ends with something that would normally be considered a cop-out in low budget horror: implied violence. The viewer is plunged into darkness and we can only imagine what actually happened.

I'll leave the final word to Steve, a school child from Coventry allegedly* questioned for the Parliamentary report 'Video Violence And Children'.

I like the bit in Driller Killer where he puts a man up on sticks and then he gets a drill and puts it through his stomach and he screams for ages

Me too little man, me too.

* This is from the excellent 'Seduction of the Gullible' by John Martin. The report quoted Steve from Coventry, even though no schools in Conventry were involved in the survey.