It’s been a few years since I saw The New York Ripper. Last time was together with a couple of friends and colleagues at a private screening at the company cinema, and it was first then - in HD, on a big screen, and together with people who never seen anything like it before - I noticed how extremely sleazy and gritty it was, to the degree faces was blushing and an awkward silence fell upon the screening room.
The New York Ripper is a dirty, perverted, disgusting, sick, sleazy, abnormal and deeply nihilistic film, but it’s also one of the finer and effective giallos out there, one of the few that goes all out in its cynical view of the citizens involved in a big city murder mystery. What Fulci creates is something more similar to Japanese cinema, where the filmmakers proudly goes over the border and refuses to come back. It’s like Fulci somehow used all the power he had to destroy his own career, to set off a self-destructive series of events finally leading to him being too weak to make good movies anymore. Did he start to slowly despise his own work, as the Marxist he was? Did he want to pull away the drug from the commercialism he’d sold himself to? Probably not consciously of course, but sometimes you do things to safe yourself.
Not counting Manhattan Baby directly afterwards, Fulci aimed for a lot of different films Conquest (fantasy), New Gladiators (sci-fi), Murder Rock (very classy, non-gory giallo) and Devil’s Honey (erotic thriller). None of them didn’t worked and he was forced to get back into the horror genre again. The York Ripper is like the end of his gore years, like he wants to take everything he learned and make it as a violent and graphic as possible and, maybe most important, back to reality. No zombies, demons, ghosts… just the most dangerous animal of them all: the human.
The cynical look at mankind, something of a speciality of Fulci, is even more evident here. Everyone in charge - from police, doctors, psychologists - none of them are trustworthy, echoing Fulci distaste of authorities or what forces authorities to live lives they don’t want to because they’re afraid of what’s on the outside of their little closet. No one has a good thought, there’s more egos here than at the Academy Awards. With New York Ripper the giallo genre also finally catches up the modern world where likes as John Wayne Gacy, the Monster of Florence and - maybe most of all - Ted Bundy rules. Gone is the charming, old-school (but bloody), mysteries á la Agatha Christie, and in is the awful reality of the world around us. The giallo genre never got back on its feet after this one, because how the hell could you even top what Fulci had in store for the world after those earlier supernatural years.
It might be only Woody Allen and Larry Cohen who’s been able to put their stamp on New York like Fulci does here. They all give us different views - Woody the neurotic bourgeois, safe from every kind of physical danger while Cohen introduces us to the hipsters, the quirky gallery of characters who inhabits the outskirts of the fancier blocks. Fulci, he gives us the trash, the failures, the unhappy bastards eating from the trash cans of society - either they have nice suits or lives in druggy neighborhoods. Fulci gives us the worms in the Big Apple.
Drenched in gore, fantastic set-pieces and with a very underrated killer score my Francesco De Masi, The New York Ripper is a true one of a kind!
"It’s been a few years since I saw The New York Ripper."
It was a long time since I saw this....on VHS as well.
"The New York Ripper is a dirty, perverted, disgusting, sick, sleazy, abnormal and deeply nihilistic film, but it’s also one of the finer and effective giallos out there, one of the few that goes all out in its cynical view of the citizens involved in a big city murder mystery."
I like your summary, I was deeply shocked by violence depicted here.....a woman getting her face sliced by razorblades, this is not a cozy film.
"It’s like Fulci somehow used all the power he had to destroy his own career, to set off a self-destructive series of events finally leading to him being too weak to make good movies anymore. Did he start to slowly despise his own work, as the Marxist he was? Did he want to pull away the drug from the commercialism he’d sold himself to? Probably not consciously of course, but sometimes you do things to safe yourself."
Could be....I remember that interview with Giovanni Lombardo Radice, he said that Fulci was difficult to work with, maybe this was one of the reasons.
"and Devil’s Honey (erotic thriller)."
Have you reviewed this one?
"It might be only Woody Allen and Larry Cohen who’s been able to put their stamp on New York like Fulci does here."
I think there are couple more directors, like Spike Lee, Scorsese, Toback etc.
But I think I know what you mean.....
"Drenched in gore, fantastic set-pieces and with a very underrated killer score my Francesco De Masi, The New York Ripper is a true one of a kind!"
I think you´re right about that....great review Fred.
Posted by: Megatron | April 28, 2014 at 23:59