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The Driller Killer

Director: Abel Ferrara Run Time: 96 min. Format: 35mm Rating: R Release Year: 1979

Starring: Abel Ferrara, Baybi Day, Carolyn Marz

This October The Deuce dispels your doldrums and delivers with a 35mm screening of Abel Ferrara’s THE DRILLER KILLER in the Times Square Theater at Nitehawk Cinema!

Followed by a Q&A with very special guest, cinematographer Ken Kelsch!

With Times Square Theater history, prizes, surprises, music by DJ BONES, and drink special at the after-party! Hosted and presented by ‘The Deuce Boys’: Jeff, Andy, and Joe. Seating begins approximately around 9pm.

NYC circa the late seventies – making it here can be MURDER! Director Abel Ferrara delineates the Hell of trying to hack it in the heart of this decrepit core-rotten Big Apple. Equal parts Art-house and Exploitation – loud and lucid, acute and cutting to the quick – THE DRILLER KILLER tells an almost all-too-understandable tale of madness in a maddening city. Looming eviction, overdue bills, oblivious roommates, the cacophony of noisy neighbors and the pressure-cooker of the “art” world, all spiral head-first into a hallucination of homicide and horror! No-Wave Punks, Pop-Art and power drills! Bums and bombast! A portrait of the artist pushed too far until…There are those who kill violently!

Shot over the two years of 1977/78 in and around Ferrara’s own Union Square apartment with many the same people he would work with for years to come – THE DRILLER KILLER quickly becomes less your standard slasher/horror and more a personal and pointed look at subcultures and fringe-dwellers in a city impossibly riddled with a readiness to squelch those values it professes to embrace.. Sold and promoted as grindhouse-gore-fest (even to the point of being banned on video in the U.K.) – Ferrara’s ferocious fable found its way from the downtown 8th Street Playhouse to fester like a tumor for years on 42nd Street. Burrowing into the brains of Deuce denizens on December 14, 1979 at the area’s namesake movie-house – The Times Square Theater – this month the skull THE DRILLER KILLER cracks may be your own!

Abel Ferrara, director and star of THE DRILLER KILLER, is the world renowned NYC-based filmmaker of modern classics like BAD LIEUTENANT, KING OF NEW YORK, MS. 45, FEAR CITY, and 4:44 LAST DAY ON EARTH.

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