31 Days of Halloween 2013: The New York Ripper

Special guest review by Ed Mishic of Crimson Screens magazine

Long ago, when I was first getting into horror movies, I wanted to see everything that I could.  This would often mean that entire weekends were spent in the basement, watching as many movies as I could fit into my waking hours.  After a while, I would program my own themed movie marathons.  Sometimes I would watch a days worth of ghost movies.  Other times it would be zombie movies.  Even other times, it would be slasher movies.  Every once in a while, I would pick out what looked like the most violent movies I could find.  These would be the boxes with the sickest covers, bloodiest artwork and often directed by names which I had started to notice.  One of those names was Lucio Fulci.  Back in the day, if you wanted to see the complete, uncut version of a movie, you might have to look beyond a video store.  The description of THE NEW YORK RIPPER in the latest Midnight Video catalog made it seem as if it was a gorefest like I had never seen before.  Soon enough, I had my own bootleg copy of the movie and it went right to the top of my programming schedule.