I haven’t seen very many Lucio Fulci movies, so when the local arthouse theatre screened The New York Ripper (Lo squartatore di New York), I decided to take the opportunity and go see it.

The thing about Fulci’s movies is that they aren’t good, but they have interesting elements. Like here, the story is full of holes, it’s very badly paced and structured, some of the performances are quite bad and they aren’t helped by being dubbed (as Italians always used to do), and a lot of things happen that don’t really need to happen, like us finding out that the professor helping with profiling the killer is apparently gay and we learn this, because he buys a gay magazine. Why? I have no idea. It feels like Fulci didn’t really know what to do with this character, as there is another scene in which someone just comes over to him, because she needs his signature on something. This is quite common in movies to show that someone is an important person. Except that here someone just randomly comes over outside. Who has papers to be signed ready outside? Who knows to look for someone outside that way?

Anyhow, there are definitely interesting things here. The makeup and effects are cool and… I guess that’s pretty much it. Well, not quite. There are some intense scenes that work quite well. But yeah, this isn’t a good movie. It is an interesting one, though.

But then there’s the cop. Lt. Fred Williams to be exact. He could not care less. When the first body of the serial killer is found, he talks to the landlady of the victim. She tries to explain how the victim had made an appointment, but he just cuts her off and tells her that there’s 11 murders every day in the city, so basically just dismissing the murder completely, even though it’s his job to investigate. He doesn’t make any notes either and later when someone using a duck voice comes up again, he didn’t even remember that the landlady had mentioned that.

That’s just the start of it. When his boss asks him how he is going to pursue this situations, his answer is basically just that he doesn’t know. One would assume that there’s some kind of a procedure on this. Instead, he just stumbles around and the case wouldn’t go anywhere if the culprit didn’t keep contacting him.

First time they speak, the culprit has found him with a sex worker and apparently he is a regular, although she doesn’t even know her name. Now, suppose you knew that there was a killer out there hunting promiscuous women, you knew that the killer knew that you knew someone that people with certain kind of morals would find promiscuous and you knew that the killer had a specific interest in you. What would you do? I mean, one would assume that at the very least he would warn her, but maybe have her followed or moved to another location. Well, no. Of course not. Not this cop, because he is lazy as fuck. Instead, she later becomes the killer’s victim, partly because he is so fucking dumb.

Because that inability to protect her was not the end of it. When the killer leads them on a chase to a false location, he tells them that he is about to kill her. So, of course, he goes to save her. Personally. He did not call any help from anyone who might have been closer. Instead, he just goes there himself. This leads to one very weird situation, where he is caught in traffic and decides to drive through the sidewalk. Except that he drives barely more than the length of his car before getting out, because he is already there. He just couldn’t be bothered to get out just a little earlier. Then he walks up the emergency stairs and when he gets up there he is so out of breath that he can barely stand up despite being only on the third floor at that point.

Throughout all of this, he just acts very bored at all times. There are times when he gets agitated, but that’s mostly when he is called out for being a completely dumbass. He is so convinced that he is correct in his assessment of who is the killer, that he won’t accept evidence to the contrary.

But the thing is that all of this is quite accurate. There have been cases where the wrong person has been convicted, because the cops simply convinced themselves that a specific person was guilty, while in other cases killers have just walked away to kill again, because the cops were too lazy or uninterested to do anything. Some serial killers have gone on to work for ages, because the cops in different jurisdictions couldn’t get their shit together and talk to each other.

I don’t know how many people realize this, but less than half of all murders in the US are solved. Here in Finland, the number is not quite hundred, but not that far from it either. It is often north of 98%. There was a year in Switzerland in 2011 when all murders from that year were solved. Of course, this is partly because the murder rates are quite different. At the same time, the police budgets are also massively larger in the US, but they just aren’t used for this kind of work as much as they should be.