Walking along the harbor, a man's dog makes a gruesome discovery. Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley) is on the case, of what turns out to be a series of grisly murders by THE NEW YORK RIPPER. Someone is stalking and mutilating young women, all while quacking like Donald Duck! The killer also speaks, sounding like "Fats" the ventriloquist dummy from MAGIC! Williams teams up w/ an expert named Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco- HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY), in order to track down the madman. Simultaneously, a bored, sexually-starved doctor's wife (Alexandra Delli Colli- ZOMBIE HOLOCAUST) indulges in everything from live sex shows, to indecent, anonymous foot massage! Yikes! Containing his usual gore overkill, this could be Lucio Fulci's most crackpot film, due mostly to an obsessive focus on the perverse and lurid. In this story, just about everyone's a pervert, creep, or perverted creep! Delli Cossi's character in particular, is so reckless in her adventurous endeavors, as to beggar belief! Sleazy from start to finish, the mega-violence is just the bloody icing on the meat cake. It's understandable to a point, in that Fulci is exploring the 42nd Street underbelly, but this movie takes it to its ludicrous extremity! Today, in the internet-driven world, such a film is rather quaint, even farcical. It plays more like a parody of its subject matter, though that may not have been Fulci's intent...

Effective giallo from the master Fulci where he certainly had the most cruel and nasty gore scenes ever,the picture badly reach around fifteen minutes already have three bodies on the morgue,the duck appears soon and many clues are placed in many directions to bewilder the audience's nose,the movie shown us a portrait of a dirty New York in early 80',many scenes in dowtown with sin's streets with a lot the theatres and nightclubs living for sex miss on sighting...true a time machine!!Resume:First watch: 2018 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7

Not really. But this movie does feature a killer who, for some reason that is never really explained, enjoys talking like Donald Duck. Such is the weirdness that comes with this Italian Galeio film. One of the weirder and less coherent of Lucio Fulci's masterpiece, this still has plenty of the expected gore, but for a Fulci film, its pretty restrained in this. Personally, this isn't one of my favorite of his movies, but it does have its moments, some of it unintentionaly hilarious, like the aforementioned killers Donald duck voice.

"The sickest movie ever made!", proudly proclaims one of the many different DVD covers for the "New York Ripper"; I wouldn't go that far, but it's certainly one of the sleaziest and most misogynistic. If that's what you're after, you probably won't be disappointed. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a good mystery, you probably will be: there are only two real suspects for the killings, and one of them is soooo obvious that you know it has to be the other (despite one last-minute dishonest red herring thrown in by Fulci - I'm talking about the last phone call). And then there are a couple of Hall Of Shame lines, like "we know from his blood sample that he's lived all his life in New York"!!! The on-location New York shooting and Francesco De Masi's score give the film a flavor of authenticity, but otherwise Fulci's directorial style is mostly point-and-shoot (or is that point-and-slash?) this time around. As for the cast, only Jack Hedley provides a center of sanity here, though Almanta Suska is not bad considering this was her first screen role. I will give "New York Ripper" ** out of 4 because it's certainly memorable in parts, but from an artistic point-of-view it has little value.