Video Nasty July - The Driller Killer (1979) and the start of the video nasty panic

and so our story starts, not with a bang but with Tony Coca-Cola and the Roosters

The Obscene Publications Act defined obscenity as that which may "tend to deprave and corrupt persons who are likely, having regard to all relevant circumstances, to read, see or hear the matter contained or embodied in it". This definition is of course open to wide interpretation.

- Wikipedia

Welcome once again to Video Nasty July - in which this horror-through-the-lens-of-storytelling Substack will zoom in on the story of a peculiar era in UK video distribution.

Some spoilers for The Driller Killer, trigger warning if you’re watching the film itself for icky animal cruelty, some gore, and inexplicably lots of shitty punk music.

hang on, I thought we were going to talk about Possession first?

Well, dear reader, so did I. Until very late in the day, Possession was going to be the first movie we tackled in Video Nasty July.

But then I had a thought.

This is a Substack which talks about storytelling in horror, in all its forms. And if we want to tell the story of the video nasty panic era, we really need to start from the beginning - with the movie which was almost single-handedly responsible for the Video Recordings Act 1984 (well, there's actually two movies which started this but the other one was Cannibal Holocaust and before you ask, because I can hear you asking, absolutely the fuck not, not even if you paid me a billion pounds).

So, everyone! Say hello to Reno Miller; a man who is, as the kids say, straight up not having a good time right now.

The Driller Killer (1979)

Directed by: Abel Ferrara

Starring: Jimmy Laine (aka Ferrara himself), Carolyn Marz, Baybi Day, Harry Shultz II, Alan Wynroth, Douglas Anthony Metro (credited as “Rhodney Montreal” which, okay, sure babes), et al

Running time: 96 minutes (theatrical release), 101 minutes (uncut version)

Original release date: June 15th, 1979

the plot in short

New York, the 1970s. Struggling artist Reno Miller (Jimmy Laine, aka Abel Ferrara himself) lives with his sort-of girlfriend and former flight attendant Carol (Carolyn Marz) and her addict lesbian lover (….*bone deep sigh*) Pamela (Baybi Day) in an overpriced, shitty apartment. He is in the process of painting “a masterpiece” for a gallery owner acquaintance (Dalton, played by Harry Shultz II) and - after receiving a particularly brutal bill arrives- begs him for an extension and a $500 loan. He is rejected, but told that if he finishes a satisfactory painting in the next week, Dalton is happy to buy it for the agreed amount.

Reno throws himself into perfecting the painting - but soon, the stress of the situation, not helped by the general atmosphere on the streets and the arrival of his new neighbours, a No Wave band called the Roosters who insist on rehearsing deeply (and LOUDLY) into the night, starts eating him alive. And suddenly, the bog-standard power drill lying around the house starts looking like a mighty tempting solution to his problems…

so, how does this movie fit into the video nasty picture?

Public awareness of the availability of so called “video nasties” began in early 1982, when VIPCO (the distribution company which distributed The Driller Killer in the UK) decided to take out full page advertisements in a number of movie magazines showing the cover of the video - the famous image of Reno drilling a man through the head - with the There Are Those Who Kill Violently! tagline prominently displayed.

Which seems like a bit of an… off choice, given that the actual US cinematic release of the movie two-and-a-bit years earlier came and went without any controversies. The cover spawned a slew of complaints to the Advertising Standards Agency, and was the one in a one-two punch of “company wants to generate press for movie, does so in stupidest way possible” that resulted in Mary Whitehouse’s public campaign against these videos.

As I mentioned earlier, the two happened a few months later, when Go Video - the UK distributors of Ruggero Deodato’s 1980 film Cannibal Holocaust, famously a nice and normal film which caused no controversies whatsoever and certainly didn’t have any allegations that it was in fact a snuff movie - had the galaxy brain idea to anonymously write to Mary Whitehouse (who you may remember was the founder and first president of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association and who made an entire career out of being a professional Helen Lovejoy WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN conservative reactionary) and complain about their own movie.

Whitehouse started her public campaign, coined the “video nasty” term and stoked a growing concern in the country. An article by The Sunday Times followed by the noted right-wing cunts at the Daily Mail starting their own campaign and basically blaming these videos for the increase of violent crime among youths (and not, you know, the Thatcherite government in which they were more than happy to play the part of paper agitators, as has always been the Mail’s wont). The growing media frenzy only increased the demand for these videos among adolescents. The National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association suggested the Conservative MP Graham Bright introduce a Private Members’ Bill to the House of Commons in 1983, which became the Video Recordings Act 1984. The bill came into effect on 1 September 1985.

but what is the actual film like?

When you watch The Driller Killer, it very quickly becomes clear that the people who were kicking off at the time about The Driller Killer were doing so on the basis of that video cover alone. Yes, it’s a horrific scene (even more so in the context of the film), but it’s also the most explicit kill scene in the movie - the camera holds the victim’s face in close up and we see the drill go in (wrongly, apparently - according to the film’s “goofs” section on Wikipedia, Reno does not drill far enough to cause death).

The rest of the film, however, apart from the last half-ish hour, is absolutely not what you would think it is based on *that* video cover. Ferrara’s second feature film (his first was a porn flick called 9 Lives of a Wet Pussy and he directed under the pseudonym Jimmy Boy L. , no I am not making this up) is more of a 90 minute unravelling of one man’s fragile grip on sanity as Reno struggles to finish this painting while trying to both pay his rent and bills and keep food on the table for him and his two roommates.

While researching, I found an article which called Reno “a sweetheart who just wants to be left alone to paint” which is objectively hilarious because Reno is many things but a sweetheart ain’t one of them. In a way, it’s interesting to see Ferrara portray Reno as a man already in the process of an undoing - a frayed yet taut elastic band of a man, moving around the world like he’s continuously on the worst fucking high of his entire life. When his landlord offers him a skinned rabbit for dinner, Reno seems to find some catharsis in just stabbing it over and over during preparation.

the neighbours from hell

Reno’s general mental state is not helped by the fact that said landlord has allowed the Roosters, a band fronted by a man who calls himself Tony Coca-Cola (Douglas Anthony Metro), to move into the building for the purpose of having a rehearsal space. The Roosters, a band seemingly consisting out of four to five guys and seven to eight women hangers-on, keep to decidedly unsociable hours and, importantly, sound fucking terrible (Carol at one point tells Reno “well, they sound good on their album” which did make me laugh).

The combination of the music, the stress of the painting deadline and the stress of life, in general, cause Reno to fray even further, and he starts seeing visions of his own bloodied face and visions of Carol with her eyes gouged out. Eventually, he snaps, and goes on a bizarre, seemingly random killing spree. Armed with a power drill connected to a battery pack, Reno stalks across the city just fucking driller killering random homeless guys for no real reason (in one scene we see a guy sitting at a bus stop and slowly Reno’s mop of curls just rises up behind him before he drills him through the glass of the bus stop which, unintentionally the funniest fucking thing in the entire movie), before returning home.

Eventually, Reno’s life properly implodes as first off, Dalton rejects the painting and second off, a thoroughly fed-up Carol leaves him and returns to her ex husband. Reno responds by just straight up killing Dalton, Pamela (poor, poor Pamela) and Carol’s ex husband, and the film ends on a sinister note as Carol walks into her bedroom, crawls under the covers where Reno is waiting and says “come here", presumably just before Reno drills her to death.

it’s just a goddamn buffalo!

Look, I didn’t like this movie at all. I think while it does set up some of Ferrara’s later trademarks (gritty urban locations, Catholic iconography - which he would use so well in The Addiction- etc), it does so in a way which is ridiculously hacky. You could make a good film out of the concept of an artist being driven insane to the point of murder by capitalism and also the worst band in history living right next door to him - this isn’t it though.

But in the context of the story of the video nasty era, The Driller Killer matters a lot. Because an entire moral panic being built off of what you *think* something is about based on a video cover alone… well, that’s just evidence of how fucking ridiculous this era was.