New York Ripper (1982)

My favorite of all Lucio Fulci films. New York Ripper is a extremely violent Giallo about a serial killer who is running around New York City quacking like a duck. (Yes you read that right) and slashing up young girls.

We have a detective and a psychological profiler on the case but the two always seem to show up to late or in the wrong place. We have a bunch of red herrings and the killer stays anonymous until the very end where he has half his face blown off.

Every character in this movie is overly sleazy. We have a heroin using, crack smoking, pervert, rapist who likes to tie women up and slash their breasts up. We have a nympho who spends her time roaming 42nd streets and attending live sex shows. We have a pervy swinging couple who record there sex acts on cassette and send a copy their spouse. Then there is one of my personal favorite scenes in a bar, involving a few trashy Hispanic fellows with pants so tight that you could almost count the veins in their balls. When women walk into their bar they sit her down and treat her to a beer before foot fucking them under the table. The Spanish men place a bet on whether or not the slut in the bar is wearing panties. Then he sticks his foot up her skirt and puts his toes where they just don't belong. All the while saying "She likes it!".

Then we have the typical Fulci, misogynist male characters. "You women are all the same! A menace to society! You women should stay at home where you belong. You've got the brains of a chicken!" and of course its only women being mutilated for the most part. We get gut stabbing, throat slashing, a broken bottle is shoved up a strippers vagina, nipples are split in half with a razor blade, a nasty razor to the hand scene, a head explosion, a razor to the eyeball, chest stabbing, etc. All the while the killer is going Quack! Quack! Quack!.
New York Ripper is a must see for anyone who likes their Giallo's very trashy and very gory. Its sure to make you quack up.

Dressed To Kill (1980)

Dressed To Kill is pretty much an Americanized Gialo and fans of Italian horror will easily see where Brian De Palma got his influence from. Dario Argento and Mario Bava mainly come to mind while watching this one but most of Argento's more graphic stuff hadn't come out yet. Dressed To Kill was released 1980 and Argento's Tenebre wouldn't come out for another two years which makes sense because De Palma didn't go for a gore flick. Instead he went for truly scary movie with very stylish camera work. Deep Red and The Bird With The Crystal Plumage were probably the two main influences for this mystery/slasher flick. Looking back now, I wonder if Argento borrowed from De Palma for Tenebre in the scene where the camera moves up the building and in and out of rooms and windows with very little cuts. If you watch the cinematography in the art museum in Dresses To Kill the camera work is similar.
Dressed To Kill is about a transvestite with some deep emotional problems who is slashing up the women that excite he/she sexually. A prostitute who witnessed the first murder teams up with the victims teenage son to track down the killer. There is a few twists in the plot but in the end when everything comes together it really makes for a genius film.

The fact that Brian De Palma chose to make a film in a genre that is mainly only done in Italy instead of doing a American style slasher really shows that the man is an artist and has enough confidence in himself to know the audience will still be pleased. I'm just glad Argento didn't decide to do a hockey masked serial killer movie. Dressed To Kill has one graphic murder scene in a elevator. The black gloved, wig wearing tranny slashes into Angie Dickenson (Big Bad Momma). First a nasty gash through her palm as she tries to defend herself and I believe that Lucio Fulci might have found inspiration in this scene for his 1982 Gialo, New York Ripper. The tranny killer then straight razors into Dickensons throat and leaves the bloodied corpse in the elevator. Angie Dickenson also shows quite a bit of flesh in this one and there is a pretty nice masturbation scene with her in a shower.

Most Horror fans would remember Nancy Allen as the girl who gives John Travolta a blowjob in Carrie. Well she plays the hooker Dressed To Kill and she shows a bit of tit too. Aside from walking around in sexy lingerie, Nancy Allen does do a good job. Allen add's tension to the cat and mouse chase scenes. One in particular takes place on a subway train and there is a group of black men chasing her from car to car. Nancy believes the killer is on the other end of the train and has no where to go. More often then not Dressed To Kill uses jump scares and although they are very affective in this movie particularly, it would have been nice to get a bit more gore. Aside from the nudity and the nasty razor scene in the elevator, Dressed To Kill offers a pretty cool strangulation scene. A bullet wound, lots of cross dressing, including a nurses outfit. We get a car chase scene and some graphic talk about sex changes.
The main thing I liked about Dressed To Kill is that it can appeal to mainstream movie goers and still please the more jaded cult film fanatics at the same time. Although De Palma went for a Italian style murder mystery, it is still a horror flick and not a thriller.

Blood And Black Lace (1964)

It is no secret that Dario Argento was heavily influenced by Mario Bava but nowhere is it more obvious then  in Blood And Black Lace. The camera work is as good as it gets in this early Gialo and the lighting is perfect. Bava's choice of colors is real eye candy for the viewer and also adds a whole new level of eerie, surrealism. Argento borrows from almost every aspect of this film. Watch Blood And Black Lace and Suspiria back to back and you will know what I mean.
Blood And Black Lace is typical of a Bava film in the sense that the movie tends to drag from time to time but the visual keeps the audience interested. Also this seems to be the turning point where Bava's films would become slightly more violent. This one came out in 1964, only one year after Black Sabbath and the level of brutality has undoubtedly increased. Still this movie is by no means a splatter film but the murder scenes just seem a little bit meaner. This Gialo follows a black gloved, (of course) masked killer. Who is killing off a bunch of pretty models. Every one becomes suspicious because everyone appears to have something to hide. It will still be a few years before we get Mario Bava's ultra-gory movies like Twitch Of The Death Nerve but the beauty and artistic view of his early work is almost just as pleasing. This is another must see from the Grandaddy of Gialo.

Slaughter Hotel (1971)

Not much of a plot going on here which almost makes this a little more of a Slasher then a Gialo. Basically the whole story is that a psycho is running around a mental ward hacking up beautiful women. Aside from a few male doctors this mental institution is apparently only for gorgeous girls. For this reason Slaughter Hotel (also known as Asylum Erotica) is more of a flesh show then a blood show. There are plenty of murders with a large assortment of weapons but the movie really lacks in the gore department. However the lack of red stuff is made up for with the massive amounts of full frontal nudity. We get to see just about every actress nude and we even get close ups on vagina's and masturbation scenes. For this reason I had very mixed feelings on this one. I went in expecting all the trashy sex but I also thought it was going to be a total gore fest as well. The violence picks up a little bit towards the end with a mental patient massacre and a whole shit load of exploding squibs. Slaughter Hotel reminded me of a less violent version of Torso. Its not exactly one of my favorite Gialo's but I can really see this thing growing on me.

The Slasher... Is The Sex Maniac (1972)

Like most Italian Giallos this movie has a whole bunch of different titles. Here's a few of them... So Sweet  So Dead, Bad Girls, Confessions Of A Sex Maniac, Penetration and a bunch more. All off these titles are different cuts with different runtimes. The copy I have in the big 80's VHS box is called The Slasher... Is The Sex Maniac. The first time I watched this one I wasn't a big fan. I think I probably got bored because the first half of the film is kinda slow with lots of talky talk, but I watched it again and really got into the later half of the film. Here's the problem, My copy clocks in at about 83 min and I did some reading on this movie. There is a 88 min, a 90 & a 95 min version out there and apparently the sex scenes were so explicit that it was released at one point as a porn film, This was the "Penetration" title. Makes sense to doesn't it? When I was watching my version of the film I felt the movie could have definitely used more graphic murder scenes. They were all pretty tame with the exception of maybe one with a nice throat slashing. The main thing that kept me going till the end was the mortician who is some sort of necrophiliac and all the beautiful woman who bare it all. While absorbing all this nudity I found it strange that there was hardly any sex scenes. This is because it was extremely cut down. If all the graphic sex was cut out I'm sure the film was much more violent as well. Aside from the fact that my print was extremely cut. I thought the film had a great ending. The plot was simple. A detective is trying to track down a serial killer who is slashing up married women who cheat on their husbands but in the end the detective finds out that his wife is cheating on him at the same time he figures out who the killer is. So he allows the Sex Maniac to kill his wife before catching him. He basically gets to have his cake and eat it to but the way the ending was put together really made The Slasher a decent giallo flick. You can be sure I will track down the uncut version and there will be another review.