I once shared a second-floor apartment with a guy who seemed to have the most rotten luck in life: his first rent check bounced, he had endless problems paying his half of the bills, and his car was always breaking down. His solitary activity (outside of attending class and smoking) was playing his lefty-guitar at high volume. And, strangely enough, he bears a slight resemblance to Reno (Jimmy Laine, aka writer-director Abel Ferrara), the starving artist driven to madness in "The Driller Killer." This film, one of the more notorious titles on Great Britain's 'Video Nasties' list, is nihilistic, grisly, and darkly funny...but also shallow and ultimately unsatisfying. When Reno tries to convince a gallery owner to front $500 for his latest painting in order to pay his bills, he is turned down; factor in the punk band that has moved in to the apartment beneath his (and never seems to stop jamming), and a commercial viewed on late-night TV (for a portable power-pack)...and it's not long before our disheveled, vulgar hero takes to the squalid New York City streets, decimating the wino population with a power drill. Ferrara has a good eye for location shooting and the grim ugliness of urban living, so that his depiction of Reno's madness isn't unconvincing. However, while "Driller Killer" has its share of frantic low-budget energy (the murders are photographed in a genuinely unsettling way), the script is simplistic and repetitive--seldom does it veer away from its exploitation surface sheen. Still, for curiosity-seekers looking for a bloody bad flick--or where a now-respected director got his start--this is a fine time "Killer."