In Scream, Jamie Kennedy’s character Randy lays out a set of rules in order to survive a horror movie, which the film itself proceeds to break. At the time, this was something original. Not because they were said within the movie, but because in reality, the “rules” Randy mentioned are part of the slasher movie trope. These slasher or splatter films generally follow the same formula over and over, only cosmetically changed slightly with inspired ideas, be it the crazy premise or the over-the-top kills. And that’s fine – it’s the trick of the trade, and fans of the genre demand this sort of familiarity anyway.
Perhaps the worst part about Driller is its complete and total lack of any originality. The plot is something so familiar that it’s not even a cliché anymore – it should be its own genre. A band of the typical college-age kids spend a weekend at a cabin in the woods, with sex and drugs in the forefront of their lobes. There are many attempts at humor, including the insertion of a sub-plot involving an untalented metal band trying to sell weed, but pretty much all of them are barely worth a chuckle. Sure, hair bands are silly in a retro kind of way, but all the funny pretty much plays out after its introduction. When they become a running gag, it’s just plain annoying.
The fact that nearly every single character in the movie smokes pot is pretty amusing, but also a testament of how one-note the whole movie is. In our band of kids, there’s the jock and the nerdy virgin, who try to get into the pants of the girls. One of the girls is a romantic, who wants to take it slow, while the other is the floozy. You know, standard horror flick template. The kids get picked off one by one by a creature – an ex-redneck after suffering an alien abduction/operation. The aliens are non-existent in this film, though. They’re just the origin of the slasher figure.
But this kind of hack writing can be saved, usually by the killer’s interesting gimmick and his unique modus operandi. Freddy and Jason come from the same neighborhood, but their differences are obvious. Driller’s killer is some guy in plainclothes with a face reminiscent of the Surgeon General in Skinned Deep, another low budget horror movie that also fails at story but entertains with a combination of great gore, a badass-looking killer, and plate-throwing midgets. In comparison, Driller is so pedestrian that it’s boring. Boring group of victims, boring killer, and boring kills. There’s only so much cheesy drilling one person can take.
Therein also lies the death trap of the flick: Drilling. Let’s forget for a moment that it’s not even an original idea for a slasher film (check out the 1979 Video Nasty classic Driller Killer), and that the concept has been used as the calling card of many killers (in The Toolbox Murders, for one, and more recently, by the title character in Showtime’s great new series Dexter). Forgetting all that, it’s just not particularly well done, and the concept feels wasted. It’s a great visual for deaths, theoretically, but after a while it loses all effect. Expectations demand that there’s a variety to the drillings, or at least a rhyme and reason to it. Maybe even a drill that’s part of the alien creature’s anatomy. In Tetsuo: The Iron Man, there’s a scene where Tetsuo’s penis transforms into a mechanical drill in the middle of sex. That one scene alone is more inventive than the entirety of Driller. The driller killer here just randomly picks up a power drill from a handyman and decides to use it as his weapon.
When everything else fail to impress, the least they could do was cater to the gorehounds. Driller offers absolutely nothing new or entertaining. There are enjoyable crappy slashers. This one isn’t.
"Driller" opens November 30, -0001 and is rated . . Written by Jason Kartalian.
