Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

The Driller Killer/King of New York ($29.95/$19.95 DVD) Abel Ferrara's 1979 art-grindhouse hybrid The Driller Killer opens with the instruction, "This film should be played LOUD," but it doesn't need volume to make an impact. The story of a painter (a pseudonymous Ferrara) whose personal and private frustrations, not to mention the incessant clamor of the punk band practicing next door, drive him to savage acts of murder. Like Martin Scorsese's '70s films, The Driller Killer thrums with simultaneous attraction-repulsion to New York's darker side; Ferrara's camera glides into Max's Kansas City like an old friend, but his character huddles in a corner and complains about the noise. Though the movie takes a few stylistic cues from exploitation cinema, the title is largely a ruse — on his disjointed audio commentary, Ferrara imagines audiences storming the projection booth, yelling, "Where's the drilling? Where's the killing?" At least, that's true until the movie's ending, when it wholeheartedly gives in to genre cliches: doors that close themselves, people who enter empty rooms and say, "Hello?" Given that part of what drives Ferrara's character mad is his inability to finish a painting, it's fitting, and perhaps intentional, that the movie doesn't seem to know how to end.

The Driller Killer is packaged with a handful of early shorts, which show Ferrara already working his central themes of class conflict and misdirected guilt. Unfortunately Not Guilty: For Keith Richards, starring Ferrara as the battle-scarred Rolling Stone, seems to be lost for good, but Could This Be Love? is a bitter, sharp comedy of manners in which two upper-class women bring a Manhattan prostitute to their suburban soiree. A lack of funds makes the locations less clear than they should be, but Ferrera's social observations are already razor-keen.

1990's King of New York, released just before Ferrara's career-high Bad Lieutenant, is a gangster drama whose glossy style is often at odds with its cautionary-tale side. On his commentary, far more lucid than The Driller Killer's, Ferrara denounces the movie as "fucking fascist filmmaking," and says he wouldn't make another movie like it if you put a gun to his head. Given the inconsistent quality of Ferrara's recent films — many of which have gone without theatrical distribution — a little repetition might not be such a bad thing, especially considering the lively, wall-crawling performances Ferrara gets out of Christopher Walken and Laurence Fishburne.

Winsor McCay: The Master Edition ($29.99 DVD) It's a good year to be a Winsor McCay fan. Checker Book Publishing is three volumes into a voluminous collection of the Little Nemo in Slumberland cartoonist's lesser-known work, with at least two more on the way, and Milestone's updated DVD collects all of McCay's surviving animated films. McCay's reputation as a draftsman of the first order needs no embellishment, but his contributions to the art of animation in its earliest years are still under-recognized. John Canemaker, who literally wrote the book on McCay, makes a convincing case in his commentary and a brief accompanying documentary that McCay was the first to endow animation with personality and realism, a case vibrantly made by the films themselves. McCay's fluid hand and heavily outlined figures transferred easily to the movie screen, and the fact that he drew every frame himself produced a uniquely personal style. Touring as a vaudeville act, McCay, who produced films for a decade beginning in 1912, would introduce and mime interaction with the animated Gertie the Dinosaur, whose movements are as graceful and more beautiful than anything in Jurassic Park. Several shorts adapted from McCay's nightmarish Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend strip show his talent for elasticity and exaggeration, combined with his flair for realism in How a Mosquito Operates to somewhat unsettling effect. And then there's The Sinking of the Lusitania, a powerful piece of propaganda which chillingly recreates the ill-fated ocean liner's last voyage, stirring resentment and righteous anger with dazzling skill — more, in fact, than McCay would lavish on the editorial cartoons he finished out his career drawing, under the watchful eye of boss William Randolph Hearst. Joining Milestone's Norman McLaren and Grant Munro discs, The Master Edition shows an impressive and gratifying dedication to preserving animation's history, and its future.