Comment by Magic Marmalade:
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young, Unhinged Serial Killer.
I actually quite enjoyed this!
>without meaning to go against the flow or general consensus of opinion<
This was one of those original "video nasties" that persons of a certain age, such as myself, would in younger school days, only hear of in whispers and by the infamous reputation it acquired due to having been designated as such.
(It was one of those that your mate at school was said to have seen the cover of a copy that his uncle's workmate's sister's boyfriend owned...Wow! - naturally enough, that's enough to make every kid in school want to hunt it down and see it.)
...But I never got to see it back in the day, and so had something of a wry smile to myself when I found the DVD in The charity shop the other day, as yet another legendary movie of my youth would now be mine to see at last!
I can see why most would not like this, as it is, oddly enough, and against all expectation, not quite the horror / slasher movie it's rep would suggest, or the very title would declare... well, certainly not in the same way that others who made this were, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Cannibal Holocaust, or even the gory, yet hilarious Evil Dead are, let alone the formulaic slashers that followed.
...No, this is actually more of a portrayal of a poor, down on his luck artist gradually losing his grip due to impoverishment, a snobby, indifferent art dealer, a the punk band who live downstairs keeping him awake all night with their one tune, played over and over again, not to mention the poverty and destitution of New York of the time, with lots of homeless desperate individuals all over the place.
In fact, it has more of a kind of Warhol / sixties, hallucinatory art movie feel about it, or even a movie student's ultra-low budget artistic rendering of a "horror" movie...
(
wait!... there's a "budget"!?!)
In fact, it takes a good half a hour or more before the first "drill kill" happens, which, in movie of only hour and a half, doesn't really make it an archetypal "slasher" flick... granted there's a flurry of kills a little later as he goes on a spree, but really, the kill count is actual minimal compared to what you might expect... And all done, in a not completely gory way really... I mean, there's "blood", but no need for practical effects, as his drill, he seems only to poke at people and the drilling is more suggested than anything, and other instances are done through clothing etc.
...Which is good thing, in way, as I'd always wondered, when pondering this movie, just how effective a hand-drill would be in this regard... after all, people would just throw the damn thing out of his hand surely, and not simply present themselves as static targets while he does his thing. No, the drilling killing is actually the weakest element in this, totally unbelievable, and actually quite comedically bad in fact... I think an egg-whisk would probably do as much damage!
So very much what I found with Hell's Angels On Wheels... a vastly different movie than you're given to believe, which may certainly disappoint those going in with expectations of a certain nature, but taken for what it really is, actually quite good.
So think of it more as being to horror / slasher movies what Dark Star is to sci-fi - not the greatest example you'll ever see, but not without it's charms.
