New York Ripper and the unbearable cruelty of Lucio Fulci
Got me a movie/I want you to know/Slicing up eyeballs/I want you to know
By 1982 the Giallo scene was getting ugly. The genre’s earliest attempts to riff on Alfred Hitchcock took a nasty turn to such a degree that its own innovators were folding back in on themselves to meet the escalating market demands for more sex and violence in the 70’s. The North American body count market delivered to European shores with slicker slasher pictures that pushed limits and offered new variety to a style of murder mystery that was growing terribly stale. A dozen movies a month dropped with bodies stacked like firewood by an unseen killer wearing leather gloves. It was a death by a thousand cuts for Giallo and the final cut came in 1980. Bava was dead.
Though Giallo limped through the 80’s and into the 90’s, with a few solid hits there, the feast days were in the past and all that was left was choppy wake. 20 years of bitter partisan violence in Italy left a black mark on an exhausted, angry public. The end of The Years of Lead coincides with an overall decline in the quality of exploitation pictures exported from Italy. It suggests that the entire nation heaved a collective sigh of relief and settled readily for Mad Max ripoffs that cast an eye away from the growing modernity within and outward toward a more immediate fantasy of surviving a nuclear war. You could see it on the face of its most prolific directors who, crossing the demarcation line between the 70’s and 80’s, left some of their finest work before tipping into a deep pit of mediocrity. The global political climate of the late 1970’s and 80’s cannot be overstated as a barometer for the escapism that various film industries the world around were producing at the time. Everything was in disarray here and abroad. Recessions in key western marketplaces were growing like cancer and the symphony of saber rattling from the USA and USSR had everyone frantically on edge. Being a child in America at this time was mind-bending, as literally everyone lived in resignation that one night in the near future the lights would all go out for the last time and Soviet ICBMs would kill us all.
In 1982 everyone was also down on New York City. John Carpenter invited us to Escape From New York. Fabrizio De Angelis wanted us all to Escape From The Bronx. William Lustig’s Vigilante put regular New Yorkers up against giggling, psychotic gangbangers. James Glickenhaus’s The Exterminator walked a similar path. William Friedkin’s Cruising insisted that dudes in leather jock straps were huffing paint and fisting each other under every bar in the city. The escalating crime rates and outrageous headlines about the city supported the public’s mental image, too. Manhattan, a symbol for the entire United States presented a dissonance that the world struggled to cope with. How could this radiant beacon of prosperity and freedom also look like that? This was not a good time for The Big Apple and Lucio Fulci was fully prepared to give it hell. For Fulci, who had just left it all on the dance floor with The Beyond, it was the beginning of a downturn that he’d never pull out of and New York Ripper was the first step on a steep set of uneven stairs to the bottom. On the way up, Fulci proved himself to be talented and multi-faceted. He was Italy’s version of a director like Michael Winner, directing comedies, science fiction, westerns, crime pictures, and horror. He could do it all and do it well. By the end of the 70’s, however, he was firmly locked into his role as the Godfather of Gore and while there’s no public indication that he was unsatisfied with this role in Italian pop culture, the pictures released following his magnum opus suggest that a little genre variety may have saved him.
Fulci was more than capable of producing gialli of a quality well above the norm. Pictures like A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Torture A Duckling shot him straight to the top, among contemporaries like Bava, Argento, and Lenzi. They’re slick and sophisticated and carried with them a deeper criticism of Italian culture at large but much of Fulci’s movies also carried a troubling suspicion of modernity and a profound misogyny at odds with the already staggering misogyny of his contemporaries. I struggle with comparing films of the past by the social expectations of the present but Fulci’s graphic and cruel violence against women in his movies is operating on a level that might have even given Dario Argento pause. To say nothing of the pathological obsession with eyeball destruction in his movies, there’s a suspicious Freudian streak running through all of them that makes a little more sense when you learn that his mother was a devoted anti-fascist in a nation perpetually teetering on the edge of fascist oblivion when not already held firmly in the clutches of a full-on fascist political majority. When viewed through this lens, the intense cruelty of New York Ripper comes into focus between scenes of a live-sex show performer getting stabbed in the crotch with a broken bottle and a weird, nonsensical dig at the modern capital of hedonism, where one of the main characters, apropos of nothing, buys an explicit gay porno mag on the streets of New York. Fulci’s New York City is a place completely void of beauty. If he is to be believed it’s nothing more than 42nd Street, block after block of filthy flophouses, and a declining empire of police stations, whose impotent authority is powerless to hold back the invading silver-toed barbarians.
New York Ripper’s plot is paper-thin and entirely inconsequential as opposed to its violence, which is vividly alive. Much of its action hinges on its blatant imitation of Brian De Palma’s Dressed To Kill, featuring Alexandra Delli Colli as a replacement for Angie Dickinson and Fulci’s endlessly put-upon Daniela Doria replacing Nancy Allen. And given the tenor of New York Ripper, you get the feeling that Fulci must have loved De Palma as Dressed To Kill also features an unfaithful wife, doubly punished for daring to indulge her starving libido with a case of STIs and then being slashed to death by a razor-wielding, black-gloved transgender slayer in an elevator. The women in that movie are similar to the ones in this movie, being modern women in full possession of their sexuality, however filtered through the eyes and judgements of the filmmakers. Because of this, they are ruthlessly punished for their sins.
Fulci also brings us back around to a puzzling quality of one of his earlier movies, Don’t Torture A Duckling. In Italy the movie was released under the title, Non Si Sevizia un Paperino, where Paperino is the Italian name of the eternally pants-less Donald Duck. In Duckling, the title is almost meaningless were it not for a late throwaway clue that ends up cracking the case, a murderer who kills children in order to preserve their purity in the face of a permissive, sex-obsessed society. Here, in New York Ripper, the killer taunts his victims as well as the police using the signature Donald Duck voice, spazzing out in the way that Donald does when enraged as he slices and dices these poor women to bits. What’s revealed in the end is as nonsensical as the Donald Duck of Don’t Torture A Duckling as the killer rages against these women while his young daughter lies dying in a hospital. The film’s criminologist explains that his anger was directed at the victims because of the full lives they led, where his dying daughter will have none, but this explanation is flimsy at best, given that, by this criteria, his victim pool could have been literally every adult-aged woman in the city. But if we step into the mind of Fulci as he made the film, the victims were almost all sexually promiscuous. Fulci, through the eyes of his murderer, judges them to have not only have lived full lives, but also to have casually thrown off any purity or innocence they may have had as children. His killer, through the child-like voice and the Donald Duck connection to a previous child/purity-obsessed killer, is killing again. One could make the argument that Fulci, himself, is the symbolic murderous connective tissue between the two movies.
Though, Freud’s Wolf Man case has been broadly criticized to death for seeing symbolism where they may not have been any, Lucio Fulci could potentially step in as a replacement. What did he see that put this particular obsession in him? It goes without saying that horror movie eyeball destruction is some nasty-ass shit that causes even me to ball up and cringe but the constant recurrence of this theme in Fulci’s movies, paired with the constant punishment of modern, sexual women suggests to me that he saw something at a terribly impressionable age which burned itself into his consciousness. It was something that he spent a lifetime destroying on film, again and again. As Italy exited years of political instability and eased into a more stable economy in the hands of Italian socialists, Fulci’s movies became angrier and more bitter, declining in quality sharply to a point which challenged the entire notion of watchability. Though, Conquest and Manhattan Baby, which followed this one, are simply bad movies made by a talented filmmaker, New York Ripper buzzes with an intensity of rage that you don’t find in Fulci’s other movies. It ends on the sourest of possible notes as the dying daughter pleads to a silent phone line to hear the voice of her father who will never answer because he just had a hole the size of golf ball blasted into his face. When she dies. She will die alone.