The New York Ripper (Lucio Fulci, 1982)

 

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.