Lucio Fulci’s The New York Ripper is an exercise in
dualities, starting with the strange tension between the heavily stressed
authenticity of its locations (especially enjoyable in the time capsule shots
of the Times Square region, with marquee attractions ranging from Carbon
Copy to Revenge of the Bushido Blade) and a gratingly dubbed
soundtrack (interiors were filmed in Rome) consisting largely of curtly
declamatory dialogue. The film constructs its narrative on a standard sicko
killer premise (the weird casting of British stalwart Jack Hedley as an
absurdly hard-bitten detective creates its own sense of displacement), while
also seeming largely sympathetic to the spectrum of human desire, whether
manifesting itself in middle-class thrill seeking or in obsessive porn
accumulation; its graphic depictions of knifing and blood-spurting and maiming exploit
human frailty and capacity for pain while denying the audience any protective
distance, with the unseen killer’s weirdly duck-like speaking style all the
more destabilizing for its absurdity. The film’s strangest and most productive
tension may be between impulse and deliberation: the killings (for instance, inside
a car parked inside a ferry during a crossing; in the back room of a sleazy sex
club) look like the opportunistic outbursts of a madman, but are ultimately attributable
to a poignantly damaged back story, to a wrecked psychology exercising its
revenge on the world in a complexly mediated manner (inevitably, the ultimate
explanation is overly rushed and not likely to address all the viewer’s
questions); the sense of multi-layered threat borders on the Fritz Lang-ian. In
a film preoccupied with looking, there’s a strangely ethical quality to Fulci’s
cinema, his brutality feels almost scientific in its precision, and the film
insists on the validity of female desire and self-determination (albeit of a
submissive and/or doomed variety). Even so, the nastiness rapidly becomes
draining, and the film isn’t exactly enjoyable, but it never feels easily
dismissable.
