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yendiThe New York Ripper. 1982. Directed by Lucio Fulci. Written by Fulci, Gianfranco Clerici, Vincenzo Mannino, and Dardano Sacchetti. Distributed by Fulvia Films.
Two recurring themes in comment threads for recent reviews have been the definition of "bad" movies and the definition of "horror" movies. You could make a serious case for The New York Ripper being a detective movie, but the vast amounts of gore, as well as the style employed by Giallo great Lucio Fulci. leave no doubt in my mind that this is a horror movie. And, no matter how you slice it, I don't see anyway to not call The New York Ripper a bad movie as well.
What's sad is that a Fulci movie shouldn't suck this much. Works like The Beyond, Zombi, and The House by the Cemetery are masterworks, and if they're not at the same level as the best work of Argento and Bava, they're still good. The New York Ripper, however, is an abject failure, creating an unholy mess out of misogyny, poor plotting, bad acting, and some of the few movie kill scenes that have ever bothered me. Oh, and let's not forget the baffling presence of Donald Duck as the murderer. Seriously.
The movie kicks off slowly, with an old man playing fetch with his dog. After a few throws, the dog decides to have some fun with the old man, and instead of bringing back the stick, he brings back the fakest severed hand evar! It's supposed to be rotting, but it's maggot-free, and so obviously latex that my first reaction to the old man's shock is that he thinks his dog mugged Tom Savini. However, it turns out to be a real hand (or, possibly, a fake hand lying next to an otherwise-real corpse).
We cut to the police station, where we meet Lieutenant Fred Williams (played by Jack Hedley), the most corrupt honest cop ever. He's basically Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, only with less drugged-out penis-waving. He drinks, smokes, treats his superiors with no respect, and sleeps with a prostitute. As he investigates the murder of the girl whose corpse was just found, he meets with her landlady. Her landlady is, well, let's call it like it is: You know the ditzy older lady played by Beryl Reid in Dr. Phibes Rises Again? Well, this landlady is a New York busybody copy of her. Sadly, she's one of the more original elements of the film (well, other than the duck). She reveals that she listened in on a phone call to the victim, and that someone sounding like a duck called shortly before the murder. Seriously.
We then meet our next victim, a young woman riding a bicycle. She fails her "dodge car" roll, and rams into a car. The driver shouts at her ("you women are a menace to the public! You've got the brains of a chicken!"), and she rides off. They both board the ferry across the river, and the biker finds the parked car and enters it, hoping to deface it with some clever grafitti written in lipstick. An unseen person joins her, and they flirt until he starts quacking like Donald Duck and stabs her with a switchblade. When the ferry unloads the cars, there's a mutilated corpse in the passenger seat. Boy will that car's driver feel stupid!
The coroner reveals that the killer stuck a blade "up her joy trail" before cutting her open. Because it's that sort of movie. He tells us that it's likely the same killer as for the first girl. We also get a few scenes of the cop and his captain arguing, and the cop and a chess-obsessed shrink chatting about the killer's profile. This is followed by a scene at a sex club, because every movie needs one. A creepy guy is watching an attractive lady in the audience, while on stage, a couple has bad porn sex. The woman in the audience licks her lips in the traditional "I'm turned on" manner, and comes just as the couple on stage pretends to climax as well. When the creepy man looks up, his fellow audience member is gone.
We follow the porn actress back to her dressing room*, where her light bulb is missing, presumably the result of her "cheap Italian bastard" manager. She wanders around the room for a bit (and we see that creepy guy is gone from the audience), and then opens a curtain, only to get stabbed in the hoochie with a broken bottle while Donald quacks like crazy about how Mickey doesn't respect him and how this will get him some attention**. This time, the stabbing is very much on screen, and even the cover of darkness doesn't make it any less disturbing.
We get more scenes of character development, meeting the female porn club audience member again and her husband, both of whom appear to be swingers and very rich. We follow that with more profiling by the shrink, and then we then get the creepiest non-murder scene in this movie, as the rich woman slums at a Puerto Rican pool hall, and gets foot-fucked by one of the pool sharks in a scene that has an ominous pseudo-rape vibe running through it. It's easily the most out-of-place scene in the entire film.
This leads us to the subway, where a young lady is stalked by that same guy from the porn theatre for about ten minutes, leading from the subway to an alley to a movie theatre. She wakes up in a hospital, where she reveals that her stalker has only two fingers on one of his hands.
A manhunt ensues for the eight-fingered man. Well, not really. They just put the word out to radio-show hosts or something. But that's okay, because the next scene shows that selfsame man tying up a prostitute, having sex with her, and then falling asleep. While he sleeps, a jazz DJ mentions the deformity, and the prostitute, rightly fearing for her life, escapes. As she runs down the hallway, however, she gets stabbed and gutted like the other victims.
We get more "character" development designed to simply muddle things up, as the rich guy turns out to have a huge gay porn collection, and the shrink has a hot assistant with whom he flirts. The hospitalized girl heads home with her boyfriend, where she talks about training for the Olympics (in bad dubbing, one presumes), and chats with the shrink. The shrink and the cop chat some more, and the girlfriend looks around the house, eventually getting startled by some very dissonant music on the soundtrack. As she's dealing with that, she discovers some papers that disturb her, but before she can process them, she's attacked by the eight-fingered man. Her boyfriend saves her, and the cops finally start a manhunt.
The next day, Williams gets a call from the killer. The killer still quacks like a duck, but when he talks, he uses a falsetto, now sounding like Mickey. It's like the killer is an unholy genetic merger of two beloved Disney characters. Williams keeps the killer on the line while the police trace the call. Alas, they never planned for the killer using the age-old "tie two payphone receivers together" method of call forwarding. As Williams listens, he hears his prostitute girlfriend getting killed. We, however, are forced to watch an incredibly graphic scene in which the prostitute is sliced up and down with a razor blade.This includes shots of the nipple and eye getting sliced up. It's disturbingly realistic.
The next scene shows the body of the eight-fingered man, who turns out to have been dead since before the most recent murder. Oh noes!
We now see a little girl in the hospital, visited by the woman who survived two attacks. We're led to think that the woman is killing on the girl's behalf. As the woman goes home and grabs a knife in the kitchen, her boyfriend picks up the phone and hears the voice of the duck. He heads upstairs, only to get stabbed twice by the woman. As he lies there, seemingly dead, she walks away, and he rises up and attacks her, quacking! Williams gets there just in time to blow a hole in his head (right through the cheek), and the day is saved. And yes, it's really just as confusing to watch those five minute as it is to read a summary of them.
We now get the explanation: The girl in the hospital is the daughter of the now-dead killer, and he would read a story about a duck to her. This somehow caused him to go psycho. As the movie ends, we see the sad little girl, begging her daddy to pick up the phone. We get one glimpse of the psychiatrist, smiling, and we're led to believe that he might really be the killer. Or maybe not. We cut away to the credits before we decide if we care***.
The New York Ripper is just a clusterfuck. Aside from the misogyny and the writing, we also get terribly pacing, with vital characters not appearing until halfway through the movie, major characters vanishing for no good reason, and an awful score moving things along. There are few movies whose murders truly disturb me (Maniac is the only other one that comes to mind, but that's a much, much better film), but the nastiness of the murders would be easier to bear in a better movie. With no cohesive narrative, bad rip-offs of tons of other movies (including a clearly deliberate attempt to recreate the sense of confusion Hitchcock mastered in Vertigo), and bad acting, editing, and dubbing, there's simply nothing to see here. Move along.
*Yeah, she has a private dressing room. This is one of those swanky sex clubs, I guess.
**What? It's as good a possibility as any.
***We don't.
Two recurring themes in comment threads for recent reviews have been the definition of "bad" movies and the definition of "horror" movies. You could make a serious case for The New York Ripper being a detective movie, but the vast amounts of gore, as well as the style employed by Giallo great Lucio Fulci. leave no doubt in my mind that this is a horror movie. And, no matter how you slice it, I don't see anyway to not call The New York Ripper a bad movie as well.
What's sad is that a Fulci movie shouldn't suck this much. Works like The Beyond, Zombi, and The House by the Cemetery are masterworks, and if they're not at the same level as the best work of Argento and Bava, they're still good. The New York Ripper, however, is an abject failure, creating an unholy mess out of misogyny, poor plotting, bad acting, and some of the few movie kill scenes that have ever bothered me. Oh, and let's not forget the baffling presence of Donald Duck as the murderer. Seriously.
The movie kicks off slowly, with an old man playing fetch with his dog. After a few throws, the dog decides to have some fun with the old man, and instead of bringing back the stick, he brings back the fakest severed hand evar! It's supposed to be rotting, but it's maggot-free, and so obviously latex that my first reaction to the old man's shock is that he thinks his dog mugged Tom Savini. However, it turns out to be a real hand (or, possibly, a fake hand lying next to an otherwise-real corpse).
We cut to the police station, where we meet Lieutenant Fred Williams (played by Jack Hedley), the most corrupt honest cop ever. He's basically Harvey Keitel's Bad Lieutenant, only with less drugged-out penis-waving. He drinks, smokes, treats his superiors with no respect, and sleeps with a prostitute. As he investigates the murder of the girl whose corpse was just found, he meets with her landlady. Her landlady is, well, let's call it like it is: You know the ditzy older lady played by Beryl Reid in Dr. Phibes Rises Again? Well, this landlady is a New York busybody copy of her. Sadly, she's one of the more original elements of the film (well, other than the duck). She reveals that she listened in on a phone call to the victim, and that someone sounding like a duck called shortly before the murder. Seriously.
We then meet our next victim, a young woman riding a bicycle. She fails her "dodge car" roll, and rams into a car. The driver shouts at her ("you women are a menace to the public! You've got the brains of a chicken!"), and she rides off. They both board the ferry across the river, and the biker finds the parked car and enters it, hoping to deface it with some clever grafitti written in lipstick. An unseen person joins her, and they flirt until he starts quacking like Donald Duck and stabs her with a switchblade. When the ferry unloads the cars, there's a mutilated corpse in the passenger seat. Boy will that car's driver feel stupid!
The coroner reveals that the killer stuck a blade "up her joy trail" before cutting her open. Because it's that sort of movie. He tells us that it's likely the same killer as for the first girl. We also get a few scenes of the cop and his captain arguing, and the cop and a chess-obsessed shrink chatting about the killer's profile. This is followed by a scene at a sex club, because every movie needs one. A creepy guy is watching an attractive lady in the audience, while on stage, a couple has bad porn sex. The woman in the audience licks her lips in the traditional "I'm turned on" manner, and comes just as the couple on stage pretends to climax as well. When the creepy man looks up, his fellow audience member is gone.
We follow the porn actress back to her dressing room*, where her light bulb is missing, presumably the result of her "cheap Italian bastard" manager. She wanders around the room for a bit (and we see that creepy guy is gone from the audience), and then opens a curtain, only to get stabbed in the hoochie with a broken bottle while Donald quacks like crazy about how Mickey doesn't respect him and how this will get him some attention**. This time, the stabbing is very much on screen, and even the cover of darkness doesn't make it any less disturbing.
We get more scenes of character development, meeting the female porn club audience member again and her husband, both of whom appear to be swingers and very rich. We follow that with more profiling by the shrink, and then we then get the creepiest non-murder scene in this movie, as the rich woman slums at a Puerto Rican pool hall, and gets foot-fucked by one of the pool sharks in a scene that has an ominous pseudo-rape vibe running through it. It's easily the most out-of-place scene in the entire film.
This leads us to the subway, where a young lady is stalked by that same guy from the porn theatre for about ten minutes, leading from the subway to an alley to a movie theatre. She wakes up in a hospital, where she reveals that her stalker has only two fingers on one of his hands.
A manhunt ensues for the eight-fingered man. Well, not really. They just put the word out to radio-show hosts or something. But that's okay, because the next scene shows that selfsame man tying up a prostitute, having sex with her, and then falling asleep. While he sleeps, a jazz DJ mentions the deformity, and the prostitute, rightly fearing for her life, escapes. As she runs down the hallway, however, she gets stabbed and gutted like the other victims.
We get more "character" development designed to simply muddle things up, as the rich guy turns out to have a huge gay porn collection, and the shrink has a hot assistant with whom he flirts. The hospitalized girl heads home with her boyfriend, where she talks about training for the Olympics (in bad dubbing, one presumes), and chats with the shrink. The shrink and the cop chat some more, and the girlfriend looks around the house, eventually getting startled by some very dissonant music on the soundtrack. As she's dealing with that, she discovers some papers that disturb her, but before she can process them, she's attacked by the eight-fingered man. Her boyfriend saves her, and the cops finally start a manhunt.
The next day, Williams gets a call from the killer. The killer still quacks like a duck, but when he talks, he uses a falsetto, now sounding like Mickey. It's like the killer is an unholy genetic merger of two beloved Disney characters. Williams keeps the killer on the line while the police trace the call. Alas, they never planned for the killer using the age-old "tie two payphone receivers together" method of call forwarding. As Williams listens, he hears his prostitute girlfriend getting killed. We, however, are forced to watch an incredibly graphic scene in which the prostitute is sliced up and down with a razor blade.This includes shots of the nipple and eye getting sliced up. It's disturbingly realistic.
The next scene shows the body of the eight-fingered man, who turns out to have been dead since before the most recent murder. Oh noes!
We now see a little girl in the hospital, visited by the woman who survived two attacks. We're led to think that the woman is killing on the girl's behalf. As the woman goes home and grabs a knife in the kitchen, her boyfriend picks up the phone and hears the voice of the duck. He heads upstairs, only to get stabbed twice by the woman. As he lies there, seemingly dead, she walks away, and he rises up and attacks her, quacking! Williams gets there just in time to blow a hole in his head (right through the cheek), and the day is saved. And yes, it's really just as confusing to watch those five minute as it is to read a summary of them.
We now get the explanation: The girl in the hospital is the daughter of the now-dead killer, and he would read a story about a duck to her. This somehow caused him to go psycho. As the movie ends, we see the sad little girl, begging her daddy to pick up the phone. We get one glimpse of the psychiatrist, smiling, and we're led to believe that he might really be the killer. Or maybe not. We cut away to the credits before we decide if we care***.
The New York Ripper is just a clusterfuck. Aside from the misogyny and the writing, we also get terribly pacing, with vital characters not appearing until halfway through the movie, major characters vanishing for no good reason, and an awful score moving things along. There are few movies whose murders truly disturb me (Maniac is the only other one that comes to mind, but that's a much, much better film), but the nastiness of the murders would be easier to bear in a better movie. With no cohesive narrative, bad rip-offs of tons of other movies (including a clearly deliberate attempt to recreate the sense of confusion Hitchcock mastered in Vertigo), and bad acting, editing, and dubbing, there's simply nothing to see here. Move along.
*Yeah, she has a private dressing room. This is one of those swanky sex clubs, I guess.
**What? It's as good a possibility as any.
***We don't.