Lucio Fulci takes a "slice out of the Big Apple" with Blue Underground's 4K-mastered Blu-ray/DVD/CD combo upgrade of THE NEW YORK RIPPER.

When a dog playing fetch brings back the severed hand of "magazine model" Ann Linn to its master, Lieutenant Fred Williams (Jack Headley, THE ANNIVERSARY) dismisses the peculiarities of the case – including the duck-voiced suitor her landlady overheard talking to the dead girl on the phone before she vanished – as just another day in Fun City. When the coroner determines that a pretty cyclist (Cinzia de Ponti, MANHATTAN BABY) disemboweled on the Staten Island Ferry was murdered by the same assailant, however, Williams starts the hunt for a serial killer in spite of the warnings of his publicity-minded chief (Fulci himself) with the frustrating help of Columbia University psychologist Paul Davis (Paolo Malco, THE OGRE). While Davis' recommendation that they must wait for the killer to strike again to compile a more complete profile frustrates Williams, they do not have to wait long as the killer starts directing them to his targets starting with sex show performer Eva (Zora Kerova, ANTHROPOPHAGUS). Although Davis is of the opinion that the killer is from a good family background and highly intelligent, the survival of wounded victim Fay (Almanta Keller, THE HUNTERS OF THE GOLDEN COBRA) points Williams in the direction of procurer and addict Mikey Scellenda (Howard Ross, FIVE DOLLS FOR AN AUGUST MOON) who tried to assault Fay on the train before her attack until the killer decides to personally dedicate a killing to Williams. Other suspects include Jane (Alexandra delli Colli, DR. BUTCHER M.D.), the swinger wife of impotent Dr. Lodge (Cosimo Cinieri, MURDER ROCK) who sends her out to Skid Row in search of perverted sensations to record for him, closeted Davis himself who gloats over Williams' lack of imagination, Fay's physicist boyfriend Peter (Andrea Occhipinti, A BLADE IN THE DARK), and even Fay herself as she questions just how much of her traumatic experience was real and how much was her imagination.

One of the most divisive of Fulci's golden age gore films – more so than the tame follow-up MANHATTAN BABY – the ultra-violent NEW YORK RIPPER sloughs off the supernatural and the gothic elements of his zombie films as well as the jet setting glamour of his earlier giallo films in favor of a gritty experience that transposes the perversion and violence of DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING to a New York which is no longer the representation of normality left behind on the journeys of the protagonists of his horror films. Starting with the opening shot panning from the background skyscrapers to the splintery pylons of the docks, Fulci favors the gritty side of New York with sex shows, dive bars, police stations, and subways with more refined settings like Davis' classroom, the Lodge home, and Peter and Fay's cozy townhouse seem sterile in comparison. Sex and violence are considerably amped up, and the onscreen gore is that much more disturbing because it is so impersonally executed by a quacking human killer as its victims are not just the genre's usual women in peril as specifically targeted because of their beauty with an emphasis on the mutilation of their most fetching features (the effects were the work of ZOMBI 3's Franco di Girolamo assisted by DEMONS' Rosario Prestopino). Daniela Doria, who upchucked her guts in CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and was literally poleaxed in HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY fares even worse this time around as Williams' regular prostitute. While the film on first watch may play like a catalogue of violence with some absurd dialogue voiced by Italian horror voice acting regulars, it is actually a well-plotted thriller with the stalk and slash sequences not only obligatory for the genre and a Fulci film but proving relentless for the viewer trying to figure out where the film is going. While the viewer may even accept the downbeat finale and its revelation of the killer at face value upon the first watch, one can on subsequent viewings appreciate the ways in which the film does try to raise the possibility before then that the identities killer and final potential victim may be the other way around. Although Fulci's regular collaborators cinematographer Sergio Salvati (THE BEYOND) and Fabio Frizzi (CAT IN THE BRAIN) are absent, the film is no less stylish with the Techniscope photography of Luigi Kuveiller (DEEP RED) taking on the cold look of Dario Argento's TENEBRAE while the funky scoring of Francesco de Masi (THE GHOST) couches the film comfortably with American-made New York-set thrillers of the period. Barbara Cupisti (THE CHURCH) has a small role as Davis' graduate assistant.

Given limited release in the United States theatrically by 21st Century Film Distribution, THE NEW YORK RIPPER was most accessible through Vidmark's brutally cropped eighties VHS which likely reflected that theatrical cut which trimmed some of the sexual content while shockingly retaining the gore. While fans could usually rely on a Japanese laserdisc or VHS for a widescreen uncut version of a Fulci gorefest, this one would have been optically censored for the frontal nudity. The first satisfactory English-friendly edition was an imported Dutch laserdisc from 1994 which was letterboxed and in English (no foreign subtitles) but Anchor Bay followed it up with an anamorphic DVD and letterboxed VHS in 1999 which was uncut but moved one brief scene from the middle of the film to the end. While imports rectified this situation, Blue Underground's subsequent 2009 Blu-ray and DVD were missing the scene altogether while a Shameless Screen Entertainment's U.K. Blu-ray was cut by 29 seconds for sexual violence but ran longer than other editions because it replaced the cut footage with cutaway reaction shots and included a fifteen second scene not included in other versions of the film.

Blue Undergrounds' 3-disc limited edition Blu-ray/DVD/CD Soundtrack combo features a new 4K restoration of the film in 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen. Although the previous Blue Underground disc was a leap in resolution over the Anchor Bay disc in which details could be lost in the deep blacks, the colors of the HD version seemed slightly anemic with regard to both skin tones and the intensity of the gel lighting. The new 4K-mastered transfer's more vivid colors are apparent from the start with the blue waters and sky background as well as the orange brown coat of the dog while the New York skies are also more detailed than before (note the clouds in that establishing shot of the Staten Island Ferry depot. The gel lighting during the sex show murder gleams like something out of a Mario Bava film (Kuveiller's operator here was Bava's 1960s cameraman Ubaldo Terzano who worked under Kuveiller on a number of 1970s films including BLOOD FOR DRACULA). The English DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1 remix has been ported over from the earlier Blue Underground disc while the mono track is now English DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0. Unlike the earlier release, the Italian track is included here in DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 with a separate set of English subtitles from the SDH track for the English dub. French and Spanish Dolby Digital 1.0 tracks are also included – the better to compare the Donald Duck voice of the killer across languages – along with subtitles in those languages.

Extras start off with an audio commentary by film historian Troy Howarth, drawing from his book "Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films" and presumably the disc's interview content below. Most interesting for even Fulci fans are stories about the origins of the project which was initially titled THE BEAUTY KILLER and to be helmed by Ruggero Deodato (CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST) for producer Giulio Sbarigia (Fulci's THE BLACK CAT) before it was sold to Fabrizio de Angelis (ZOMBIE) who retitled it THE RIPPER and advertised it in Variety with the now iconic still of Fulci in his director's chair on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway during the filming of THE BEYOND. The original screenplay by Gianfranco Clerici (DEVIL FISH) and Vincenzo Mannino (VIOLENT CITY) had a killer suffering from Progeria before Fulci regular Dardano Sacchetti (CUT AND RUN) retooled it for Fulci's requirements (the Clerici/Mannino script would later be filmed by Deodato as OFF BALANCE with Michael York, Edwige Fenech, and Donald Pleasance and would be released direct-to-video stateside as PHANTOM OF DEATH). Although Howarth does not refute the usual charges against Fulci of misogyny, he does suggest that THE NEW YORK RIPPER's amped up violence, gore, and sex had less to do with Fulci pushing the envelope than the direction taken by the entire genre in light of the slasher boom including Blue Underground producer Bill Lustig's own MANIAC.