If you're interested, here's my review of the movie

(Contains spoilers)
Plot Summary:
New York City is a wonderful place to visit or reside in… unless you’re a gorgeous young woman, because—if you are—you may just meet your demise by the hands of a vicious, blade-wielding, duck-quaking, psychopathic serial killer who, before savagely killing his victims, loves to both mentally and physically torture them first for his own perverted gain. In order to stop the mayhem and madness, a jaded, chain-smoking detective named Fred Williams, teams up with a psychological profiler, Dr. Paul Davis, and, together, they follow the killer’s trail of mangled bodies and clues that they can only hope will lead them to one of New York City’s most infamous citizens. Will the bloodshed reach an end?

The Lowdown:
There’s an awkward scene in The New York Ripper where a psychiatrist questions an injured woman, who’s lying on a hospital bed beside her husband, a physicist, about her near fatal confrontation with a man suspected to be the New York Ripper. She’s told him and authorities that her attacker is Mickey Scellenda, a shady looking man who’s bereft of a few fingers on his right hand, but, not entirely convinced, the psychiatrist asks her if she’s certain that he’s her attacker. Once questioned, the woman, visibly tentative now in a close-up shot, turns her head to look at her husband, who then, visibly nervous in another close-up shot, quickly turns his to look at her, which prompts the psychiatrist to grow suspicious by their reaction to his question. The thing that’s awkward about that scene is not that it obviously insinuates that her spouse is her attacker so much as because of the fact that it insinuates that she’s certain that he is by the way it’s all set-up, which becomes news to us—the viewers—as we were not led to believe that she even suspected him of being a menace in earlier scenes following the attack, when she was seen comfortably alone with him in her hospital room, and strikes us as being utterly bizarre and absurd because, for a woman who’s certain that her husband is a notorious serial killer who attempted to deprive her of her life, in those earlier scenes, she’s unusually calm, cool and collected. Oh, and she doesn’t do what we would expect her to do—tell the authorities that the Ripper is her husband!

There are several awkward scenes like that in The New York Ripper, that take themselves gravely and intend to generate an atmosphere of tension, but merely wind up producing the exact opposite effect they intended to thanks to the movie’s egregious screenplay, which is brimming with scenes that are as gawky as they are risible, and with the type of dialogue that’s so dreadful, only a character from a bad B-movie would utter. In addition, The New York Ripper, like all of writer/director Lucio Fulci’s flicks, has many undeveloped characters. What Fulci does in his flicks is introduce to us unfleshed-out characters, then has his antagonist (s) walk in, stalk and then kill them (suspenseless). Would it have hurt had he actually bothered to develop the characters in his flicks a little? Even the central character, Lieutenant Fred Williams, is one-note.

Then there was the dubbing, which was utterly ungainly. It was very comic-inducing.

Another thing that went against this flick was its intense misogyny. Watching it, you sense a filmmaker who had feelings of great abhorrence towards women existing within him, who’s had it with them, and who’s given them the finger by choosing to make a radical movie like The New York Ripper, which depicts some of its female characters as overly imprudent, reckless and unpleasant ones. There’s even a scene where a coroner, while examining one of the Ripper’s victims, says to Lieutenant Fred Williams that the killer could’ve done a better job. Watching this movie, you feel as though Fulci is saying that the women deserve it. One of Fulci’s goriest movies was the moody and tense City of the Living Dead (ever see a woman vomit all of her internal organs out before?), but The New York Ripper is definitely his most extreme exercise in sheer cruelty and sadism. Through research, I’ve learned that Fulci evidently had a very bleak love life. Apparently, he never managed to maintain adequate relationships with women and grew to hate them, and it is particularly in this movie that you sense all of that hatred that he had towards them, which sometimes made for a discomforting experience.

Obviously, I don’t think that this is a very good movie, but to be honest, boring it never was, because I found the story to be intriguing, and there was an irresistible element of cheese about it. I laughed while watching it, a lot, whether due to the ‘80s funk music, the ridiculous duck-quaking, the quick zooms, the wanna-be-cool sixty-something burned-out detective (who at one point glances right at the camera), or the writing. The acting, while it wasn’t particularly colorful, lively or exciting, was generally credible. There were some putrid performances, but they were part of the fun of watching this bad, bad movie. And then there’s the graphic, unapologetic gore, which disturbed me, as it intended to, and grabbed my attention, as it intended to, as well, so that I guess is a positive thing. The movie doesn’t shy away from unflinchingly giving us a look at a helplessly strapped woman getting her nipples slit ever so casually and slowly by the Ripper to augment the already unsettling nature of the situation. I liked the ballsy gore, a lot, but not, however, the movie’s hateful attitude towards women, which was vile and redundant. I appreciated the movie’s gutsiness, but didn’t share its views, for I thought that it went too far with the relentless misogyny. I had nothing against the gruesome visuals; it was the attitude that I had a problem with.

This movie is good for two factors: 1), for comic purposes, and 2), for one to release one’s anger. I guess releasing his anger towards women is one of the reasons as to why Fulci made this cathartic movie, but he didn’t need to be so hateful towards women.

Note: The New York Ripper exceeded the limits of horror to such a degree, that Lucio Fulci (who passed away from a diabetes-related illness in 1996), received several death threats and the movie itself ended up getting banned in several countries, including the UK, where, and I quote from the website 80s Movies Rewind, “the British Board of Film Censors committed the risible act of having the film escorted by the police from their offices and straight to the airport and out the country!”

Human beings ain't only just human, you know—they got animals living inside of ‘em, too. —U-Turn