Lo Squartatore Di New York: Not A Nice Place To Visit, And I Certainly Don’t Want To Live There

As near as I can tell, there are a couple of different types of Italian horror films that get filed under giallo. You’ve got the stylish (or at least stylized) murder mysteries, where lots of people get stabbed or strangled or otherwise dispatched by mystery figures in black leather, and then you’ve got the zombie/demon movies, where some gate to hell or another gets opened up and all kinds of gooey monstrosities emerge to kill, eat, and both eat and kill people. Where do cannibal movies fit? If/when I ever make a point of watching any, I’ll let you know, but I wouldn’t hold your breath. I know that giallo describes a wider range of movies than this, but this is what I’ve observed so far. And regardless of which of those two types it is, there’s one thing they have in common: They’re bonkers. Not a shred of subtlety to be found. The more I think about it, “outrageous” really fits, in that they’re both wildly unconcerned with plausibility and also likely to evoke outrage.

And in both those regards, Lo Squartatore Di New York (The New York Ripper) fits the bill in spades. It’s the kind of film that gets described as being “very much of its time,” but really that just means it’s sleazy and gross on multiple levels. Worse, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to bring together the two types of giallo I outlined above, but does so without including the strengths of either. The narrative doesn’t hold together, and it’s bloody and violent without being either stylish or over-the-top enough to get over. It’s kind of the worst of both.

That said, I have to applaud the opening. We get a scenic view of what is presumably the East River, and an older gentleman walking his dog along the trash-strewn asphalt adjacent to the riverbank. Ah, city living. He finds a chunk of wood and he throws it. Like the very good girl she is, his dog brings it back. So he throws it again, and she dives into some bushes to retrieve it. But when she comes out, he looks at her in dismay, as the camera cuts to her standing there holding a decomposed human hand in her mouth. It’s not an especially surprising scene, I would have been more surprised if it had gone any other way, but then it freeze-frames on the shot of the dog holding the rotting hand and plays all of the opening credits over it. It makes you look at that hand. The movie is saying “you are in for some shit,” and it’s right.

Cut to world-weary police lieutenant Fred Williams at the precinct house, taking the statement of a dotty old landlady who is reporting one of her tenants missing. Does his cop intuition tell him there’s more to this than a flighty young woman who’s taken off for an impromptu trip? No, not really, but he’s the protagonist, so he’ll have to do. We move from New York’s finest standing around looking bored to a young woman riding her bike to the Staten Island ferry. She accidentally scrapes against a car along the way and the driver makes a point of loudly explaining to her that she’s a menace to society with the brains of a chicken and how “you women” should stay at home where they belong. And yeah, that’s…this movie came out in 1982, and that’s pretty much how the whole film is going to be. As luck has it, he’s parked on the ferry, and as they get underway, this young woman takes the opportunity to slip into his car and write “shit head” on the inside of the windshield in lipstick.

But before she can finish, she is interrupted by someone with a switchblade. Permanently.

So Lieutenant Williams gets assigned to investigate the Mysterious Case Of Why Women Are Turning Up Dead. He is ostensibly assisted by a psychologist named Dr. Paul Davis, who will be helping him develop a profile of the killer. I say “ostensibly” because mostly all Dr. Davis does is play chess, look smug, and belittle the people around him. What follows is a lot of stuff happening, in no particular order. This is a film that doesn’t move from scene to scene so much as it lurches from scene to scene, and though you can make out something of a story, there’s not a whole lot of attention paid to pacing or structure or anything like that. Characters are routinely introduced with little to no context in the way that you expect that connections between them will be revealed, or that they’ll cross paths and things will make more sense, but not so much. In most cases (at least the women), they’re in the movie to get murdered and that’s kind of it.

So this is a film about a police investigation into a series of murders, but I can’t really call it a procedural, because that implies that there’s anything resembling procedure. This film makes leaps in logic that would easily take Olympic gold if it were an event. Apparently, Wiliams is able to determine the killer’s age and that they’ve lived their entire life in New York City from…a blood test. That’s…that’s not a thing. The killer makes a point of calling the police to taunt them, and even though this taunting consists of the killer saying “you’re so stupid” a lot and quacking (yes, quacking), Davis determines from this that the killer is very intelligent and cultured. In theory, Williams is working with Davis to catch the killer, but they confer maybe three times over the whole film – large sections go by apparently having forgotten this was supposed to be happening. Davis’ analysis of the killer is empty psychobabble, but really, that’s just par for the course. It’s easy to tell that everything in this film is based on someone’s speculation about what police work and psychology are, since presumably there was no money or time for a consultant, and so they just made shit up. Most of the film is just ping-ponging between characters, setting up red herring after red herring. Is it the man with two fingers missing, who attacks a woman on the subway? Is it the wealthy doctor with some very specific kinks? Is it the young painter whose girlfriend narrowly escapes the killer? Is it Dr. Davis? Hell, is it the police chief? The answer will surprise you, because it’s totally unrelated to any of the clues the film has planted.

So it’s a clumsy, incoherent story, told in clumsy, incoherent fashion. The dialogue’s as stilted as you’d expect from an Italian production set in New York (Williams to the police chief: “Well, if it isn’t the big chief person himself”), although there’s enough location shooting that it feels like New York, and it’s New York of the early 80s, all grubby and run-down, subway cars scabbed over with graffiti and dingy apartments and porn theaters in Times Square. All of which is explored in the most prurient and salacious way possible. Is there any real reason why one of the murders requires a lengthy sequence at a live sex show? Not really, and yet here we are. There are more than a few shots of nude female bodies on morgue tables, many of the women happen to be naked when they get killed, and there’s one sequence involving a nude woman and a razor blade that is genuinely nasty. The effects are still obvious, but well-done enough that it isn’t as comical as it could be. And there’s one sequence with the wealthy doctor’s wife and two men in a bar that had me wanting to take five or six showers once it was over. Put simply, the film is misogynistic as fuck. Women exist in this movie to be naked and/or stabbed. They’re sex workers, or someone who had the nerve to talk back to a man, or stuck-up rich women slumming for rough trade, and even the one the film goes out of its way to tell us is a genius? She’s also prone to hallucinations. Bitches be crazy, am I right? We learn that Davis is most likely gay – does it end up mattering? No, thank goodness, given the genre’s track record with homosexuality, but it’s portrayed through a fairly leering one-off scene that ends up contributing nothing to our understanding of him either. It’s an uncomfortable film to watch, and not in the sense of being confrontational, so much as it feels like you’re stuck in conversation with an oily little creep who thinks jokes about rape are funny.

It just sort of bounces back and forth between murders and aimless conversation until the third act, which keeps you guessing (or more specifically, confused) right up to the end, revealing a rationale for the murders absolutely head-clutching in how convoluted it is. Even by giallo standards, it’s kind of a doozy, coming out of nowhere, just like everything else about this film. It’s a thriller without the visual flair of those giallo at their best, and it’s got the graphic violence of the more straightforward horror giallo without being evocative, and it manages to preserve all of the gross attitudes of the period. So it’s evocative of another time, absolutely, but it’s a time that nobody in their right mind would want to revisit.

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