The Worst Film Ever

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

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.This is the first great film of director Abel Ferrara, and with him he brings long-time collaborators writer Nicholas St. John and cinematographer Ken Kelsch. Ferrara somehow makes a very low-budget film seem almost as good as a studio film. Perhaps casting himself in the lead was the best budget stretcher of all. That, and using his own apartment as the principal set.Not unlike other genre films, "Driller" followed up a pornographic film, so this works as a transition for Ferrara into the big time. Connecting both films is producer Rochelle Weisberg, who Ferrara describes as "a gangster from Detroit" who has some connection to "Debbie Does Dallas". Apparently someone figured out that it would be cheap to make a horror film, not unlike the wildly successful "Texas Chain Saw Massacre", and Weisberg was ready to finance such a film.Ferrara has also said, "Mean Streets inspired more bad acting than any film ever made." There is no doubt that Ferrara's work is inspired by Martin Scorsese (both "Mean Street" and "Taxi Driver" to name just two), but really the inspiration is New York City itself. In Ferrara's films, New York (especially the area around Mulberry Street) is its own character, the very architecture a personality as big as any other character.The film has a relatively low rating on IMDb, and I have to concur with that rating. While the camera work is great, the acting is adequate, and the killing scenes are some of the best of any horror film of the era... the problem (at least for me) is the running time. Far too much time is spent on the band, the Roosters, who really have no importance to the plot. A cut of five, ten or fifteen minutes... and this would be a fast-paced blood feast that not even H. G. Lewis could match.The Arrow Video Blu-ray is a 4K scan from the negative, making the film look as good as it can -- and much better than the public domain prints floating around. A new audio commentary with Abel Ferrara and his biographer Brad Stevens is available, allowing Ferrara to critique his work thirty-plus years after the fact and tell tales of actresses who became heroin addicts. Apparently it is the second commentary track Ferrara has done for the film, so why the older one was not used is unknown. On top of the commentary track, we have a brand-new interview with Ferrara and a 30-minute visual essay covering his career in some detail, highlighting his themes and even lesser-known works. Perhaps the best bonus of all, though, is "Mulberry St", a full-length documentary by Ferrara on the neighborhood that inspired his films.

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.

You know I came across this movie, I'd be longing to see, I joined up with a video shop, way out of my area, cause I couldn't get this title anywhere else. Knowing it was an Abel Ferrara film, I was expecting this to be much more gorier, (his gore always shocks) watching some nut go around killing people with a drill. Well.... I was almost, stupefied. I couldn't believe what I was watching. It was the drill that let me down, kind of not keeping up his part of the bargain. Abel plays the nut, and does it well I might add. He's a kind of Lou Reed looking character, a struggling and loud artist, sharing a loft with too girls. As pressure from all sides takes it's toll, he snaps, going out there onto the streets, in the dead of night with his mack drill, and killing derelicts. The pizza chomping scene, I remember well in this disappointing unshocker. On the most part, the film actually bores. I'd probably see it again, one day, out of curiosity, just to confirm my analyzation, but I'm steadfast with this one, as I'm rarely wrong.

A deliciously grimy and dirty debut from Abel Ferrara ('Bad Lieutenant'), 'Driller Killer' follows an artist (played by Ferrara himself) whose frustrated attempts to make ends meet and find creative satisfaction against a backdrop of urban decay and the interminable punk-rock cacophony of a band in the apartment above him eventually get the better of him and lead him to emotional breakdown and maniacal, grisly homicide.The story of a city-dweller (New York, no less) who can't take it any more and snaps clearly owes much to 'Taxi Driver' but, in contrast, 'Driller Killer' is distinguished by an almost total lack of the psychological and technical finesse so characteristic of Scorsese's film and makes its point through a relentless inarticulate bludgeoning of the viewer which could be said to be an (ahem) acquired taste. Having said this, the film isn't as gory as its cult status on the list of "video nasties" compiled by the Director of Public Prosecutions in England in the early eighties would lead you to believe and in lacking both the searing transgression of films like 'Cannibal Holocaust' or the all-out gore of films like 'The Beyond' or 'Evil Dead' some may well be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about.However, all things considered the film is an enjoyable psychotic romp (in a masochistic sort-of-way) and I have always found its limitations to be an indispensible part of its appeal as the low budget and technical bludgeoning are central to evoking a genuine sense of the stifling degeneration of New York at its nadir. What's more, the films depiction of the psychosis such milieus engender walks a perfect line between a partly distanced comic-book presentation and a crushingly claustrophobic and authentic sense of madness made manifest.**************************Public domain movie. Watch it free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaQLbLJiA50Watch short trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1Dn57QgvRwWatch extended trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFobdamXZvo