The New York Ripper

Directed by Lucio Fulci
You're going to want to take a shower after watching this slice of cinematic sleaze. Every main character introduced has some strange sexual hang up that would keep a dozen psychiatrists working around the clock busy for a year.
At the harbour an old man is throwing a stick for his dog to fetch, one toss lands the stick into some bushes. The dog exits the bushes carrying the severed hand of a female victim. Elsewhere the Staten Island ferry is making it's way back to the island, among the blaring horns of the ship a woman is sliced and eviscerated by an unseen assailant.Jane a sophisticated, well dressed woman is sitting in the front row of a live sex show secretly tape recording the performance for her husband. A sleazy looking man who is missing the ring and pinky fingers of his right hand sits himself several chairs down from Jane.As the two performers show is coming to a climax, Jane is beginning to get into the act,(if you know what I mean ) a solo performance of her own. The once occupied seat down from her is now sitting empty. The female performer goes back to her dressing room, in it's blackness she discovers by broken glass in her bare feet that the bulb has been smashed.Hearing a noise from behind a curtained closet she approaches only to have her privates mutilated by a broken bottle.This movie is sprinkled with lots of the sleaze factor through out, again the nicely dressed Jane borrows the Porshe and drives out to 42nd street area. Sitting in a pool hall, she is quickly noticed by two Hispanics who make a bet with each other regarding if she is wearing panties or not. Slipping his bare foot out from his shoe and between her legs" Morales has silver toes " he says. A minute or two later he owes his friend Chico a beer. Jane enjoys putting herself in danger , she meets the three finger man at a hotel for a little bout of S& M. Is this the man that has been taunting the police and particularly Inspector Williams with phone calls and quacking like a duck. Yes folks you read that right, this killer sounds like Donald Duck on quack, I mean crack. Like I said before every main character has some sort of hang up with sex, even our protagonist Inspector Williams. He sleeps with a prostitute but they act like an old married couple.Eventually Inspector Williams teams up with Paul, a psychologist to help with the capture of the sex killer. Turns out Paul likes to buy magazines with naked men in the pages.When a phone call from the quacking killer leads Inspector Williams on a wild duck chase , oops I mean a wild goose chase, Williams learns that the killer is at his prostitute, Kitty's apartment.This scene is no doubt the one that is talked most often when the conversation turns to The New York Ripper. The killer has Kitty tied to her bed, sweeping a razor blade over her body, finally resting the blade on her forehead. Pressing the blade into the flesh, and pulling it down across her eyeball. Next we see the blade divide an erect nipple, in extreme close up. Fulci has been labeled a woman hater in the past, and this film is not going to help matters with his label as a misogynist. Earlier films of Fulci's such as The Beyond, The Gates of Hell and Zombie we have seen a young girl's head on the wrong side of a shot gun blast. A woman puking up her intestines and yet another woman having her eyeball impaled onto a nine inch splinter of wood. But Ripper is Fulci at his nastiest with it's various sex crimes, the slicing and dicing of women and the pscychological themes of insanity. This is in our world, this could be real, sometimes it is real. There are no zombies here or hotels built over a gate to Hell,making this film more realistic. With it's red herrings, whodunit murder mystery and themes of insanity The New York Ripper comes across very much like a giallo. Many years ago In Italy pulp novels were published, these books contained stories of murder, mystery and sex. The books themselves were binded between bright yellow covers.Giallo means yellow in Italian. Soon these books were made into low budget films. Dario Argento being credited as one of the first directors to work with this sub genre.
I found this film's pacing a little slow, most giallos are. The tone, ugly, most scenes taking place on 42nd street or Times square. Today these areas are clean and respectable places but back in the days, scum bags, druggies and low lifes wandered these streets night and day. The overall atmosphere comes across very gritty and grungey looking,with endless scenes of Adult movie houses, peek shows and live sex performances being offered. I thought the killer's identity was not a strong point in this picture,I felt the motive behind the killings were rather weak as well. The reasoning behind the duck like voice is actually absurd.
My Thoughts: This is by no means Fulci's best work, The Beyond IMHO is the one that does it for me. Check out Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling for an earlier try at a murder mystery.The cover states that it is The Most Controversial Horror Film Ever Made! Sorry but I'll have to disagree.
My Rating:2.5 Go Go Girls out of 5 Sure , there's lots of skin to look at, but it all ends up mutilated.