The New Skiffy and Fanty: Changes to Come on the Show
A little while ago, we ran a listener survey to learn more about how you access our show, what you listen to, what you like and dislike, and so on. That survey garnered a lot of wonderful responses — thanks! As such, The Skiffy and Fanty Show will be changing a bit. These changes aren’t permanent. They’re an experiment. We’ll reassess in a few months to see how it’s working out, and we’ll ask you all for feedback again (because you’re awesome). Here’s what you can expect around these parts for the foreseeable future:
Around the World: The Driller Killer (1979; dir. Abel Ferrara)
As Abel Ferrara’s first non-porn feature film, The Driller Killer serves as a signpost of the director’s vision of New York City and its social ills. Ferrara would hone this vision into a more coherent film three years later (in Ms. 45), but in The Driller Killer, he was, I think, in his rawest form: vulgar, uncompromising, and noisy. It’s not surprising, then, that the film was banned in the UK in 1983 given that its UK distribution included a still shot of one of the more gruesome scenes in the entire movie: a man having a drill bit shoved into his skull. What is surprising is that, as Mike Bor of the British Board of Film Classification notes, Ferrara’s film was “almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act of 1984,” a reactionary piece of legislation that required creative works to be classified to be legally sold; unclassified works, as such, would be banned.
