New York Ripper (1982, Lucio Fulci)

A guy’s dog finds a severed hand by the river, the guy says “ow my balls” and jaunty TV theme music starts. Fulci in TV detective show mode, it almost looks like a proper movie but all the dialogue and human behavior is wacked out in a slightly Italian way. The premise: a guy talks in a deranged Donald Duck voice as he kills women all over New York. Fay (who looks somewhat like the Hellbound puzzle girl) is dreaming the killings, which are being committed by her boyfriend (a stone-age warrior in Conquest). Lead cop on the case Jack Hedley (just off a Bond film) had previously called the killer “a very superior mind,” and after blowing the boyfriend’s face off he says: “You know it’s strange, the brain.” This guy can’t keep his own clues straight, and loses his favorite prostitute to the killer along the way. Me, going out to tape Gun Club at Danceteria: After The Beyond, Fulci made two NYC movies (this and Manhattan Baby) before Conquest. This one suggests that New Yorkers in 1982…