The New York Ripper (1982)

NEW YORK RIPPER (1982)

Dir: Lucio Fulci

A dog playing fetch by the waterfront, brings back a severed hand. Thus, our investigation begins. All we learn is the killer has a duck-like voice. Our first kill. A woman attempts to vandalize a car from within. The killer slides in the car. His switchblade springs erect, and the woman is trapped between the ferry and the killer. We see Lady Liberty in the distance. The killer stabs her in the stomach, slicing upward toward her sternum, another stab in her left breast, and then he pulls the blade down. The wounds bleed dark red. We see her scream. The ferry's horn and the water's current drown her out. We've reached the other side, the car remains lifeless, and we see her topless corpse. Our first on-screen kill down, and if we made it through unscathed, Fulci will see to it that the next one will up the ante.

Filled with live sex acts on 42nd Street, broken bottles penetrating female organs, razor blades slicing through nipples, big toe seduction, ASMR in the 80's, throat slicing, burnt-out cops, sex-workers, and DJ's dedicated to the case. This is the grisly world of Fulci's New York City. The New York Ripper has no redeeming value to it. It’s misogynistic, nasty, and brilliant. There is still not a version of this film that has been release fully uncut. The effects work here are so convincingly brutal they are on par with Cannibal Holocaust (1980). If Ripper was shot as a documentary film and the actresses provided additional funds to hide out for a few months for promotion, Fulci would have been arrested too. The gore that Fulci insisted upon in Zombie (1979) or his Gates Of Hell trilogy made his name synonymous with gross-out effects. The practical effects he includes in Ripper are all reality-based. There are no zombies, there’s no puss, there’s no eye splinters, there is just an old-fashion knife-wielding serial killer. Fulci, when he’s at his simplest, is at his most depraved.