The New York Ripper (1982) Review

A dog on the riverbank retrieves a human hand. A detective is assigned. Over the following weeks women are killed in increasingly specific ways, and the killer telephones the police using a voice that is a duck impression.

The 3 is for a film with genuine technical craft applied to material that has 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 am reviewing this because it is 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, was refused, 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, which is an unusual step and tells you where the film sat even among banned material of that decade.

The specific objection was not the violence in the abstract. It was that the killings are staged at length, focus on women’s bodies, and combine sexual imagery with mutilation in a way that is difficult to read as anything other than intended.

That is the honest assessment and it is 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 does not 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 does not work here.

The Duck

The killer’s telephone calls are delivered in a quacking voice, and this is the film’s single most discussed element.

It is genuinely strange and it does one useful thing, which is to remove any possibility of the killer being frightening in a conventional register. A man quacking cannot be menacing, and the film therefore locates the horror entirely in the acts.

Whether that is 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, which is the point at which the film loses any remaining defense. A plot that has 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.

What the decision demonstrates is that an unusual choice is not 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 is 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 the city is filmed by somebody who had looked at it and not at other films about it.

There is a sequence on the ferry itself that 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 is doing the work instead of the staging.

The bicycle sequence and the pursuit through the subway are both competently staged, with legible geography and a genuine sense of distance. Fulci understood space.

That is 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 does not deserve it.

Francesco De Masi’s score is also better than the film. It is a lounge-inflected theme, repeated, which produces an effect of indifference that is 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 is not registering any of this, which is a real thought and is not 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, which is a sentence that describes a considerable amount of work from that industry.

The Procedural Half

There is a police investigation in here and it is competent and dull, which is 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 is 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 is 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, which the film cannot sustain 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 is genuinely 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 is not it gets the most screen time, which is the conventional move and is handled clumsily. He is established as unpleasant, is pursued at length, and his removal from consideration is delivered as an event and not as a deduction.

Why It Is on the Page

It belongs on a list about cities eating their own, and it is the entry on that list that is 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, which shows in a way that is 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 honest summary is that Fulci made two or three films worth arguing about and this is not among them. It 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 does not always support.

He said in later interviews that he considered it among his own worst, which is worth recording without treating it as absolution. A director can regret a film and the film still exists in the form he shot it.

Should you watch The New York Ripper?

No. Technically capable, well photographed, and constructed 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. Watch Zombie instead if you want what Fulci could really do.

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