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.
