The New York Ripper (1982) Review
3/10
A dog on the riverbank retrieves a human hand. A detective is assigned. Over the following weeks the killer kills women in increasingly specific ways and telephones the police using a voice that’s a duck impression.
The 3 is for a film with real technical craft applied to material that’s no interest beyond its own cruelty. Fulci could compose a shot, the New York location work is good, and none of that is what the picture is for. I’m reviewing this because it’s on the page instead of because it merits attention. If you want Fulci, Zombie is on this site and is a considerably better use of the same skills.
What the Objections Were
The film was submitted to the British censor in 1984, the censor refused it, and existing prints were reportedly ordered destroyed. It remained unavailable there in any form until the early 2000s.
James Ferman, who ran the British board at the time, reportedly took a personal position on it and had the print deported instead of simply refusing it. That’s an unusual step and tells you where the film sat even among banned material of that decade.
The objection was that the killings are staged at length, focus on women’s bodies, and combine sexual imagery with mutilation in a way that’s difficult to read as anything other than intended.
That’s the real assessment and it’s not squeamishness. Two sequences in this film, one involving a broken bottle and one involving a razor, are constructed so that the duration and the framing are doing something the plot doesn’t require. The counter-argument usually offered is that the giallo form is stylized and the violence is operatic. That defense works for Argento, where the killings are abstract and beautiful and largely bloodless in effect, and it doesn’t work here.
There’s a real distinction between depicting cruelty and dwelling in it, and the measure is duration against necessity. If a sequence runs three times longer than the plot requires and the extra time is spent on the body, the work has told you what it’s for. The whole film has to support the stylization defense. A picture that’s otherwise plain and functional can’t claim its violence is operatic.
Ask what your reader is doing during the scene. If the answer is waiting for it to end, and it continues, you’ve made a decision about them.
The Duck
The killer’s telephone calls are delivered in a quacking voice, and this is the film’s single most discussed element.
It’s strange and it does one useful thing. That’s to remove any possibility of the killer being frightening in a conventional tone. A man quacking can’t be menacing, and the film therefore locates the horror entirely in the acts.
Whether that’s deliberate is arguable. The explanation offered in the last reel is specific and psychological, arrives from nowhere, and reads as a justification constructed after the fact for something the film wanted for its own sake.
The reveal also involves a child. That’s the point at which the film loses any remaining defense. A plot that’s been about cruelty toward women for eighty minutes produces a final explanation that routes it through a sick child, and the film treats that as pathos.
The child reveal is where my patience runs out completely. Eighty minutes of women being carved up, and then the film asks me to feel something tender because a sick child is involved. I find that move cheap and a little sickening, and it spoils the one useful thing the duck voice had going for it.
What the decision shows is that an unusual choice isn’t the same as a good one. The quacking is memorable, is the reason anybody discusses the film, and does nothing for it.
Fulci Can Still Compose
The technical work is real and it’s the only reason to give this a 3 instead of lower.
The New York location photography is strong throughout. Staten Island Ferry, the Bowery, a run-down cinema, a bridge, and whoever filmed the city had looked at it and not at other films about it.
A sequence on the ferry itself is the best-photographed thing in the film. Water, the terminal, the Manhattan skyline behind it, and a shot held long enough that the location tells the story instead of the staging.
The bicycle sequence and the pursuit through the subway are both competently staged, with legible geography and a real sense of distance. Fulci understood space. That’s the frustrating part. The same director who arranged the cemetery sequence in Zombie and held on a woman approaching a splintered door in that film is here applying the identical facility to material that doesn’t deserve it. Fulci had the eye and he had the city, and he spent both on a razor and a broken bottle, a squandered gift. I’d happily watch him shoot the Staten Island Ferry for ninety minutes with nobody getting hurt. Francesco De Masi’s score is also better than the film. It’s a lounge-inflected theme, repeated. That produces an effect of indifference that’s more disturbing than anything the plot manages. The choice is the closest thing the film has to an idea. Pleasant music over a killing establishes that the city isn’t registering any of this. That’s a real thought and isn’t developed anywhere else in ninety minutes.
De Masi scored a great many Italian genre films across three decades and this is among his better efforts. That’s a sentence that describes a considerable amount of work from that industry.
The Procedural Half
The police investigation in here is competent and dull. That’s the film’s other problem.
Jack Hedley plays the detective as a tired man working a case, and the material given to him is entirely conventional. Leads, a psychiatrist, a suspect who’s not it, and a second suspect who is.
The psychiatrist is the giallo convention and this one is used badly. He delivers profiles that are wrong, then a profile that’s right, and the film treats the discipline as a plot device that supplies answers when required. The profiling scenes also date the film precisely. Behavioral analysis was entering popular awareness in the early eighties, the terminology in this script is roughly contemporaneous with the real thing, and the film treats it as a method that produces answers on demand.
Paolo Malco plays him and the part is written as an intellectual equal to the detective. The film can’t sustain that, because the character has to be wrong for an hour. The relationship between them is the closest thing to a structure the investigation has.
What’s poor is the misdirection. The film introduces three possible killers, one of whom is dispatched in a way that removes him, and the resolution involves a character the audience has almost no reason to have considered.
The suspect who’s not it gets the most screen time. That’s the conventional move and the film handles it clumsily. It establishes him as unpleasant, pursues him at length, and delivers his removal from consideration as an event and not as a deduction. The investigation bores me senseless, and I think that’s worse than it sounds. A film this nasty ought to at least keep me guessing, and this one just walks Jack Hedley from lead to lead while the next killing gets lined up.
A mystery’s solution has to be available to the reader. Not obvious, but present, and reachable from information the text has supplied. A resolution involving somebody the reader had no cause to consider isn’t a twist, it’s a withheld fact. Don’t use a profession as an answer-dispensing device. A psychiatrist who’s wrong until the plot needs him right has taught the reader that the discipline is a tool instead of a subject.
A dull investigation between violent sequences is the standard shape of a bad film in this category, and the shape itself gives it away. The plot exists to get from one killing to the next.
Why It Is on the Page
It belongs on a list about cities eating their own, and it’s the entry on that list that’s least interested in the city and most interested in the eating.
The 1982 New York material is the same material Ms. 45 was shot in that year and Times Square two years earlier, and all three films are looking at the same streets with entirely different intentions.
That comparison is the useful thing about including it. Ms. 45 uses the district to make an argument about what it does to somebody, Times Square uses it as a place where people live, and this uses it as a backdrop.
The comparison with Fulci’s own Zombie is also instructive about what he could do with material he found interesting. That film has an argument about colonial history underneath it, and this one has a killer and a delivery date.
Fulci was also not from there. That shows in a way that’s not entirely a criticism. An Italian production shooting New York produces a version of the city assembled from what a visitor notices, and the result is vivid and slightly wrong. The real summary is that Fulci made two or three films worth arguing about and this is the work of a capable director who took a job and executed it. The cult reputation is worth addressing directly as well. It exists, it rests largely on two decades of unavailability, and scarcity reliably produces an interest that the work itself doesn’t always support. He said in later interviews that he considered it among his own worst. That’s worth recording without treating it as absolution. A director can regret a film and the film still exists in the form he shot it.
Three works can use identical material and be doing unrelated things, and the difference is entirely intention. That’s the most useful comparison available to any writer. Find the two other books that used your setting and establish what each of them wanted from it. A capable person executing a job produces competent work with nothing underneath it, and readers can tell. That’s a different failure from incompetence and it’s more common.
Not everything in a category deserves the same seriousness. A reviewer who treats every entry as equally worth defending has stopped being useful.
Should you watch The New York Ripper?
No. Technically capable, well photographed, and built around sequences whose length and framing serve nothing in the plot, with a killer who quacks and a solution the audience has no way to reach. It gets a 3 because Fulci could still frame a shot, and that’s all it gets. I resent a film that wastes that much skill on cruelty, and I’d send anyone curious about him straight to Zombie.
