The New York Ripper (

1982

) ½

I have no interest in serial killers, either obsessing over the minutia of their heinous deeds or plumbing the depths of their psychosis to understand what makes their warped minds tick. I understand that I am in the minority here, as I see the huge swaths of documentaries, dramas, and films centering around the real-life exploits of famous serial killers. To me though, focusing on these scummy lunatics just makes me feel depressed. Even if the film doing the exploration is of high quality like Maniac (1980) or Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), it still leaves me cold. Sure, the films are disturbing, meaning the filmmakers certainly accomplished their goal, but I have little ability to empathize with or understand the monsters onscreen. I'm left in a stupor like Iceman's parents in X2: X-Men United (2003) asking: “Have you tried not killing people?”

However, I will acknowledge that serial killers do serve a useful purpose in fiction: They are excellent fodder for police procedurals. Most murderers are caught with the same basic method of finding the person most likely to have committed the crime (be it for money, jealousy, or personal enmity) and just asking them a lot of questions until their story starts to fall apart. Usually, this process is aided by forensic evidence but police interrogation techniques are so impressive that they can often pull confessions out of completely innocent people! However, serial killers change all that, as they are not murdering their victims for any comprehensible motivation like a desire to collect on an insurance policy. Hell, most of the time they don't even know the victim at all, let alone well enough to have a reason to kill them. In these cases, detectives have to rely on the hard sciences of forensic evidence and the soft science of psychological profiling to get any results at all.

At its heart, The New York Ripper is just such an old-fashioned procedural. It makes a degree of sense, as the murder mystery was the genre-branch from which Giallo horror films grew. Sure, director Fulci is best remembered for his zombie (Zombi 2 (1979)) and supernatural horror films (City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1981)) but his first horror movies were Giallos like A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) and Don't Torture a Duckling (1972). As the genre aged it became less and less focused on the cops solving the murder and more and more focused on the gruesome murders themselves. In this sense, The New York Ripper is a throwback not just to Fulci's Giallo past, but to the early days of the genre as well, because while the film is remarkably gory it remains focused primarily on the cops and psychologists trying to capture the vicious killer. The result feels like what might have happened if Lucio Fulci directed an episode of Columbo and the TV censors took the week off. This, incidentally extends to the soundtrack as well, which is a mixture of soft jazz from a TV cop drama and the harsh synth sounds of a sleazy European horror film.

We begin with a memorable scene of an old man playing fetch with his dog in the park. He tosses a stick and the dog goes and retrieves it. This goes on for a surprisingly long amount of time, until, eventually the man tosses the stick into the bushes and tells the dog to go look for it. The dog returns, but this time with a decaying human hand in its mouth! It's a startling and effective opening that draws the user into the situation in a way that is eerily possible. Sure, you in the audience are almost certainly not a murderer, a homicide detective, or even someone likely to be murdered; but some guy out walking his dog, now that is a real everyman. It reminds me of the sequence at the start of Blue Velvet (1986) where the protagonist Jeffrey finds a severed human ear in the woods and is drawn into a web of murder and crime that he didn't know existed.

Here, the hand belongs to one Anne Lynn, a prostitute who had recently gone missing. This in and of itself is no great concern as we're told later on that there are 11 homicides a day in NYC, over half of them women (this statistic is completely made up by the way, as it would mean the city would have more than 4000 murders a year, almost double the worst year in the city's history; moreover I have never seen a murder rate where women were more likely to be killed than men). However, this case catches Lieutenant Fred Williams' attention, as the medical examiner notes an unusual resemblance to an earlier murder. Even so, the investigation doesn't get into full swing until another young woman is gutted on the Staten Island ferry, once again matching the same MO. It looks like New York has another psycho killer prowling its streets.

Since there are no obvious leads, Williams is forced to turn to some professional help in the form of Dr. Paul Davis a professor of psychology to help profile the killer. This is a good decision both for the character and the screenwriters, as Davis makes an excellent foil to Williams, with the former being a meticulously neat, professional egghead from an ivory tower university while the latter is a crusty blue-collar cop. The two can play off each other in classic buddy-cop movie fashion. It's a winning formula and I can see why this dynamic has been copied throughout the decades with films as disparate as Cure (1997) and The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976).

Still, the pair are not very good at their jobs if I'm being completely honest. Davis quickly deduces that the killer is educated, neat, and probably from a good family. However, having done that though, he plans to wait around for more bodies to start piling up. They do in short order, but even as more victims start to show up there's no progress whatsoever. Things only start to move in the case when the killer leaves one of his potential victims, a girl named Fay Majors, alive. The girl can give a rough description of her assailant, a middle-aged Mediterranean man, missing two fingers on one hand. That should narrow down the search considerably, though there is some reason to suspect her testimony as Fay is frequently subject to vivid nightmares and hallucinations. Indeed, the audience has additional information that may exonerate this 8-fingered Greek, during the sequence where Fay was attacked we only see him a few minutes before a knife-wielding maniac with a camera POV shot turns up.

Normally, I love it when Italian filmmakers set their movies in America because it opens up opportunities for all sorts of silly cultural misunderstandings to pop up. Like the way characters in City of the Living Dead (1980) treat a town in rural Massachusetts like it's a lost medieval village in the Carpathian mountains, or when the “Americans” in Absurd (1981) celebrate the big football game by standing around in their living rooms drinking red wine and eating pasta, or when the characters in The House by the Cemetery (1981) act like a family grave is a normal thing to find in the middle of an American living room. Unfortunately, there is none of that here, despite the fact that Lucio Fulci, the director of the New York Ripper, is the man behind two of my previous examples of cultural confusion. I suspect that this is a product of the particular setting of New York City. It is after all, just as much an international city as it is an American one. Moreover, it's so over-represented in media that no one in the Western world with a TV could regard it as anything less familiar.

No, the real culture shock here is someone familiar with the Post-Giuliani image of New York City, the foul-smelling, rat-infested Disney World for the rich. This is very much a film from the bad old days of the city, where rather than hipsters and oligarchs, the city was filled to the brim with junkies, whores, sex fiends, and gang-bangers (of course, if the latest crime stats are any indication, the bad old days of NYC might just be the city's future). The city here is an open sewer, and the scenes that Fulci filmed on location in its filthy streets carry a certain authenticity. Though this is undercut by the use of Italian interiors for some sequences, and even I suspect a couple of townhouses in Rome for exterior shots. As a result, the film does lack some of the authentic grime of Basket Case (1982) or Super Fly (1972), that filmed in real NYC flophouses and nightclubs. I can understand the director's decision to spend as little time in NYC filming the New York Ripper as possible, I can only imagine the insurance premiums he'd have to pay. Still, the film does lack a bit of that authentic 1980s NYC sleaze.

To compensate for this shortcoming in exterior filth, Fulci has given us a cast of characters utterly mired in sin and degradation. Seriously, almost every character in this movie that appears in more than two scenes is a secretive pervert in some fashion. It ranges from extreme cases like Mikos Scellenda, the man who “lives just for sex” and gets his jollies off by tying up bored housewives, to mild ones like Lieutenant Williams' penchant for hookers. Every time you think a character may not be a secret pervert there will be an aside to show you that you're wrong, like the scene where Dr. Davis buys homosexual pornography at the newsstand. This, I hasten to add is not a character trait that will go anywhere, the film just has to establish that yet another character has unusual sexual proclivities. This is a city so completely given over to vice that a married woman can't even have a meal in a restaurant in the middle of the day without getting foot-fucked by the other patrons!

The audience sees this world of illicit sex and then watches the killer repeatedly target beautiful young women, and naturally assumes that the killer is a sex maniac. Amusingly though, this is a red herring. Sure, the killer is crazier than a bag of cats but oddly enough he doesn't have any sexual hang-ups. He's just pissed that his daughter is dying at a young age, and resents these women for having a life that she does not (though by this logic, shouldn't he be targeting hearty grandmas who have already lived a full life?). Perhaps this is a sly bit of chastisement of the audience, berating us for only thinking in the crassest possible terms. Hell, during one of the murder sequences the killer playfully remarks "Is that all you can think about" ostensibly talking to his victim but perhaps targeting the lustful members of the audience as well.

There is at least one baffling decision on display during an otherwise well-crafted thriller: the choice to give the killer a bizarre distinctive voice. Now, in principle this would be fine, we don't see the killer's face until the very end of the movie, so we need a way to identify him immediately. However, I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to make him speak in a high-pitched cartoon character voice and constantly quack like a duck. Was one of the film's screenwriters savagely beaten as a child while Micky Mouse cartoons were playing on a nearby TV? As I don't see how anyone lacking that particular trauma could conclude this was in any way frightening.