 |
 "New York City: It's a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to die
there!" There's a psychopath at large in New York and as the police track the
killer down, "each brutal murder becomes a sadistic taunt." They call
writer/director Lucio Fulci an "acclaimed horror maestro" and let us know that
the movie was shot on location "in the mean streets of New York City." They
say this movie is one of Fulci's "most savage and controversial
thrillers." 1983, 93 minutes, Widescreen, DVD
Lucio Fulci takes a break from his supernatural slasher movies (see: The Beyond , House By The Cemetery and City Of The Living Dead) to revisit his second favorite genre, the Donald Duck related slasher.
Surprisingly enough it took Lucio close to a decade to get around to plowing
this fertile territory again and sadly, the results are all that we had feared.
His
first go around with Disney's miserable mallard was detailed in Don't Torture A Duckling and we may pause for a moment to remember that in that movie a Donald Duck
doll was an important clue to the identity of a raving madman. In this all new
take on things, it isn't a Donald Duck doll that figures prominently, but a
killer that taunts the police by calling them up on the phone and talking like
Donald Duck, complete with quacking noises. As I listened to this goof go on
and on (less time calling in threats and more time carrying them out please!) I
couldn't help but think that his voice sounded closer to the Batman's tubby
nemesis the Penguin, than to Donald Duck, though admittedly the quacking was
very well done. Even with this sure fire gimmick, the movie falls short in
hitting the mark on much of anything other than gratuitous violence (which is
probably supposed to be its saving grace). Like is usually the case with these
types of pictures, it all starts when a man and his dog are playing fetch
along the river in New York City and that dumb dog goes off and brings back a
severed hand instead of the driftwood the old coot threw to him! Thus begins
the perplexing case of the New York Ripper. You get an idea of what level
Fulci was working at when the opening credits roll over a still shot of the
severed hand in the dog's mouth, while this CHiPS-style music periodically plays whenever someone has to drive around New York
City. Fulci realizes though, that most of his audience (Euro posers that try
and elevate this trash above its status as a simple slasher movie, by assigning
it the fancy-sounding term "giallo" when we all know that a "giallo" movie
involves Italian tramps getting hacked up, not NYC skanks tasting the blade.)
is expecting a little more than a doggy bag of left over body parts, so we get
the big kill scene on the ferry. Some woman gets all slashed up inside of a
car she was vandalizing. Isn't how they keep Singapore so clean?  Our first real problem crops up when we meet our cop in charge of investigating
this string of homicides. He's an old skinny guy that walks around in a
Columbo trench coat and has the personality of an old, skinny cop in a
trench coat. The trench coat would fare better when it was being worn by the
rich pervert woman that visited live sex shows in Times Square, but for now we
have to content ourselves to someone straight off of Barney Miller or
something. You know, I like a main character to be less than 80 years old and
have a little something on the ball (someone like that one guy in that one
Italian horror flick that either Bava or Argento made - he might have had a
beard), but if I'm going to have to have an old crabby cop, I want it to be a
fat guy who eats a lot and is always drinking coffee and mixing cuss words
together in colorful new ways. It helps to take my mind of the idiotic
investigation that is sure to follow (consult expert, wait for more killings,
stumble onto big clue or big coincidence, wait for more killings, confront
killer, surprise ending). So you've got Lt. Williams on the case and his first
big break is from the nosy landlady of one of the dead girls who says
something about how she accidentally overheard a phone conversation where a guy
was
talking like a duck to this girl. Immediately Lt. Williams and I racked our
brains trying to match all the perps we knew that talked like ducks up with all
the Italian film directors we knew that wallowed in tiresome gore movies. The
only conclusion I could come to was that Lucio Fulci was the guy that directed
this movie. Then I realised that I already knew that and decided that I should
leave all the guessing to the experts (cops, psychologists, nosy landladies,
etc.). Williams has seen enough serial killer movies to know that he should
check with one of those eggheads that spends equal parts time studying the
demented
forms the human psyche can assume and grooming their beards.  In this case, the bearded one is Dr. Paul Davis. He's played by the same guy
that was the lead in House By The Cemetery and he does little else in this
movie except play chess against a computer and ramble off the standard
psychobabble about serial killers (He's smart, from a good family, and is
ke-raaaayyy-zeeeeee!). Oh and he also buys gay porn magazines. Confirming my
long
standing suspicions about these bearded guys in Italian horror movies, there is
a scene at a newsstand where Dr. Davis has to decide whether to purchase the
latest issue of Honcho or Blueboy. Confounding all my expectations he picked Blueboy. Everyone knows that real men like Honcho! I'll bet that he was
probably just trying to get a peek into the killer's mind when he snagged a
copy of that and the Daily News. Right, Dr. Davis? Right? Anyway, this whole
thing is never brought up again, thus depriving us of that scene where the cop
finds the good doctor hunched over his dog-eared copy of Blueboy allowing him
to make some vague homophobic remark about college professors (I guess you'll
just have to imagine it like I did). Of course this homophobic cop (or did I
imagine that?) has his own skeletons, too. See, when he's not off at work
taking phone calls from Donald Duck, he's sneaking over to the house of his
prostitute, Kitty. I'm not sure what type of hooker has you stay at her house
- it would seem to limit the amount of business a working gal like Kitty could
do (hehehe) in an evening, but I'm sure that on a cop's salary he can afford to
have her the whole night. Anyway, she's the kind of gruff hooker who barks out
lines like "I'm a prostitute, not your wife" when Lt. Williams asks her for
some coffee. Into all this lusty bliss comes a phone call from Donald Duck!
Donald is on the line talking to Lt. Williams and I don't remember what he said
("Quack, quack, something or other") but the gist is that he knows that Lt.
Williams likes to shack up with Kitty and isn't it so scary that he followed
him there and watched him. Of course, I don't know how he knew which apartment
he went into, who lived there, or how he got her phone number (surely a hooker
would be unlisted, right?). 
So who is this Donald Duck character and what's his problem? Suspicion
naturally falls on the three-fingered Greek guy that is out there seducing and
trying to rape some women. This is where that rich broad in the trench coat
comes into the picture. Her husband likes to listen to audio tapes of her
getting off, so she goes out and hooks up with guys in bars and porn theatres
and generally behaves like we always thought those good-looking rich babes did.
This three fingered guy also follows a woman around and she ends up getting
attacked by him or does she? For some reason, she is able to escape with only
minor leg injuries, but she hallucinates that it was her boyfriend that tried
to puree her or does she? We find out that she's an Olympic hopeful (she wants
to win the gold in L.A.!) though I was never sure what her sport was, besides
dating psychopaths and that she is prone to hallucinating stuff (like she has a
chance of winning the gold in anything). So was she crazy to think it was her
boyfriend trying to do her in? The three-fingered Greek gets some bad pub
because this rich girl that he had tied up his apartment escapes and gets
herself slashed in the hallway, then that Tonya Harding wannabe says a
three-fingered Greek tried to kill her. This results in the police searching
some gal's house where he used to shack up and he had all these dirty
magazines, though they all looked like straight mags to me (sorry Dr. Davis!).
The best thing in that apartment was that hanging on his wall was a picture of
what appeared to be himself posing naked in front of a picture of Marilyn
Monroe, thus making this film a must see for Monroe fans. Donald Duck calls
Lt. Williams again and this time they trace the phone call to a booth at
waterfront, but that tricky devil is using a walkie talkie set next to a phone!
He babbles on and on about dedicating a killing to Williams and the next thing
we know Williams realizes with utter horror that Donald Duck is going to kill
his favorite hooker, Kitty! He races against the clock, but is way too old and
slow to get there before the killer can slice her up. Fulci gives us loving
close-ups of her eye and nipple being sliced with a razor blade, finally letting
the guys in charge of the rubber nipples and plastic eyes to earn their money. I think I speak for all us that have lost hookers that were close to us, when I
say that Lt. Williams really wants to get this bastard! And he does get him,
when the guy's body is found with a plastic bag over his head. It looks like
suicide, but knowing all the three-fingered Greek rapists I do, they wouldn't
ever take the easy way out. It turns out that the guy was dead several days
before Williams' prized prostitute got herself killed, so the real killer is
still on the loose. The explanation for who Donald Duck is revolves around
some girl that is laying in a hospital bed and missing an arm and a leg. It's
really as dumb as it all sounds, but you get to see Lt. Williams blast a hole
in the killer's face at the end of the movie. Fulci does set up an interesting
world view in this movie, where everyone and everything is involved with sex.
The problem is that the whole payoff doesn't involve any of that. The killer
isn't motivated by any of the sexual hangups portrayed in the movie and seems
to be driven my some misplaced sense of revenge and anger. Among the things
that Fulci was able to do in Don't Torture A Duckling was connect up his killer's motive with the rest of the film's themes (fear of
outsiders and progress). That movie was also much more successful because the
violence was shocking in its viciousness and advanced those themes. In this
movie, the violence doesn't have any bearing on the motive or the theme about
omnipresent sexual appetites. It's there to purely to titillate (like many of
the movie's non-violent scenes) and provide an avenue for Fulci to display his
trademark gore. Like a lot of these slasher movies, there is more emphasis on
the slashing part than on anything else. There isn't really anything going on
by either the doctor or the cop that leads them to discover the identity of
the killer. They move from crime scene to crime scene, taking calls from Donald
Duck, talking amongst themselves and eventually by process of elimination show
up at the house of the only suspect, while the suspect is trying to kill again.
With the lack of mystery, the movie has to rely on the charisma of its
characters (none) and the atmosphere it generates (seedy yet uninteresting) and
without any of those it all feels like an empty vessel designed to showcase a
few gory killings. A sleazy and violent epic of Fulci-style cinema (bad music,
exaggerated camera work, exaggerated gore, and bearded guys) that he handled
with much more aplomb in the true giallo, Don't Torture A Duckling.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
|
|
