The New York Ripper



The New York Ripper (1982) is a slasher flick by Italian shock director Lucio Fulci, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not surprised by the fact that it was bad. What did surprise me is how bad it was. Even though I knew this movie as “the one where the killer talks like Donald Duck,” I still wasn’t prepared for the sight of women getting murdered by a knife wielding maniac who quacks his way through the act.





Play the above sound file and look at the picture for an incredible simulation of this movie.

The biggest problem with the later giallos is that they couldn’t be bothered to construct a real mystery. The New York Ripper is basically a tour of various low rent New York City locations, with a different woman getting killed in each location by a pair of gloved hands. There is a semblance of a mystery, with a grizzled police detective investigating the murders, but red herrings are introduced in scenes that don’t connect up with anything else. There are two characters who are particularly bizarre. One is a gigolo/pervert who encounters three of the Ripper’s victim shortly before they are attacked. He is even identified by the police as the Ripper at one point, but when all is revealed there is absolutely no explanation for why he and the Ripper kept bumping into the same people at the same time. The other is a rich woman with perverted sexual tastes who we see doing various things, but the large amount of screen time she’s given turns out to have nothing to do with anything. She is eventually killed by the Ripper, but there’s no reason to believe that’s anything but a coincidence. I’m particularly bitter about the long, unpleasant scene where she is sexually molested in a restaurant by some strangers. If you’re going to show something like that it should at least forward the plot.

Posted: Mon - August 15, 2005 at      

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