- Year
- 1982
- Country
- Italy
- Runtime
- 93 min
- Director
- Lucio Fulci
- Updated
- 10 Aug 2026
- Obscurity
- known (28/100)
- Also known as
- New York Ripper · Psycho Ripper · The Ripper
- Banned in
- UK
The New York Ripper
Refused a BBFC certificate with the print reportedly escorted out of the country under guard.
Genuinely nasty and hard to defend. The killer quacks. It doesn't help.
The hardest Fulci giallo to defend, and he seems to have known it. A killer who taunts the police in a Donald Duck voice works his way through the women of a grimy early-80s New York, and the murders are protracted and mean-spirited in a way that goes past suspense into something uglier.
It is well made, which is part of the problem, and the Donald Duck detail tips the whole thing into a register nobody has ever quite explained. It was seized and banned across several countries.
Technically accomplished and thoroughly unpleasant. Know what you are getting.
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Written about
- Gut-munchers: the Italian zombie boom, 1979 to 1983
There was no first one. Argento recut Romero, Fulci forged the sequel, and Italy spent four years feeding the British censors.
- Banned, cut and confiscated
A Fulci print flown out of the country, an Australian rating that just means no, and a German court that filed The Evil Dead under criminal violence. Three states, three machines for making a film disappear.
Filed alongside
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Mykonos has never looked prettier or hosted anything uglier. Mastorakis dared himself to be banned and won.
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A DPP video nasty far better known for its poster than for anything in the film.
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The best-looking giallo nobody names, shot by Storaro between two Bertoluccis.
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Barely a murder mystery. A slow psychological collapse, and superb.