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Rating: Setting aside a first feature film from 1977 whose title needs little interpretation ("The Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy"), Abel Ferrara makes his debut like this, in 1979, under the pseudonym of Jimmy Laine: a claustrophobic metropolitan drama colored by dark shades, black as the night and red as the blood that populates it.
The film tells the story of Remo Miller, a penniless painter from the Lower East Side who cannot gain acceptance in New York's underground circle, engaged to a dissatisfied woman who cheats on him with another woman, constantly broke and therefore at risk of eviction. Out of the blue, crushed by depression, he buys an electric drill and begins killing random people, mostly vagrants. This is the plot, zero complexity for a film that finds its strength in the allure of the trapped rat: the protagonist, played by Ferrara himself, is indeed a small being trapped in an oppressive reality made of concrete and tar towards which he eventually feels an instinctive urge to rebel triggered by the role this reality has reserved for him (does he kill vagrants perhaps because he rejects his own destiny?).
The direction already hints at the metropolitan master of the years to come, the film is shot with a negligible budget and it shows, the few means available give the hour and a half of screening the dirty and cardboard-like taste of b-movies of yesteryear (for certain settings it can be compared to Frank Henenlotter's "Basket Case"), but the star of the show is the sound, or rather the noise: Remo is in fact tormented by the noises surrounding him, the telephone, the chaotic city, the chatter, the drill but above all the band playing in the next apartment and that haunts him throughout the film. Abel Ferrara in this sense almost creates a Noise Rock work, accompanying the gloomy images with the dirty and distorted riffs of the guitars, with the raw sound of the rock bands that can be heard pounding their instruments in dime-a-dozen practice rooms ("This film must be played at high volume"). Ferrara quite explicitly draws on the lesson given by Martin Scorsese in "Taxi Driver", the lone, disturbed man, shifted and stuck in the modernity that generates a growing neurosis in him: both films are shot in a filthy and indefensible New York, both protagonists gradually lose touch with reality in favor of their own justice, but if De Niro/Bickle opposed a rotten society here Ferrara/Miller triggers a revolution dictated by pure personal outburst. It's not explained and it's not meant to be understood why the murderous fury breaks out, the fact is it happens and it seems normal.
The film falls into the category of slasher movies even though it doesn't show an excessive dose of violence (the bloody episodes are few and concentrated together) and will inspire Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho", although Remo Miller is from a totally different social background. Ultimately: a little gem.
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