Fantastic Fest 2008

Brief Description:
Three low-life handicapped losers recruit an arrogant and abusive author to play drums in their punk band. Layered with brutality, surrealism and bloody violence, Ex Drummer is like no music film you’ve ever seen.

Full Description:
A blast of pure adrenaline and a hard kick to the nuts, EX DRUMMER is the most exhilarating and most grueling debut film released in recent memory, a film that immediately establishes Belgium’s Koen Mortier as a fierce, visionary talent with the potential to become one of the world’s true greats. Do we love this film around here? Hell, yes. But your mother will probably hate it.” (Todd Brown, Twitchfilm)

Koen Mortier's EX-DRUMMER introduces the audience to a deaf guitar player, a stiff-armed bassist and a psychopath guitarist-vocalist with a lisp, all of whom form a rock band for a one-off performance. The trio lacks a drummer so they seek the services of a celebrity author, who also has a reputation as a drummer, to fill the role. The author joins the band so he can exploit the band for source material and his own sadistic pleasure. Out of this mess is born The Feminists, a quasi-disabled punk rock band (Flemish band Millionaire provide the music) whose journey towards its only gig drags almost everybody involved down a black hole of abuse, exploitation and death.

EX-DRUMMER is adapted from a novel of the same name by Herman Brusselmans, and the film has drawn comparisons to TRAINSPOTTING. Such analogies do not really capture what is going on in EX-DRUMMER. The film's non-stop barrage of clever visuals, vulgar humor, random violence, and high energy music (The Feminists tackle a solid cover of Devo's Mongoloid and tracks from Lightning Bolt, Isis, Mogwai and others also appear on the soundtrack) places EX-DRUMMER in an entirely different cultural and aesthetic space than any possibly comparable film. EX-DRUMMER seems to take a stab at offending every possible segment of society: men, women, majorities, minorities, homosexuals, kids, punks, politicians, the abused, the aged and the infirm are all the subjects of the film's ridicule. EX-DRUMMER is angry, funny and entertainingly foul from beginning to end. (Rodney Perkins)