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The ugly duckling and the slashed nipple, a Géricaultian composition. A steal from Friedkin's Cruising introduces the view under the Brooklyn Bridge, the credits roll over a freeze-frame of a purplish, severed hand gripped by an old man's dog. One young woman is slaughtered while trapped in the belly of the Staten Island Ferry (the cityscape vanishes in the distance, the switchblade fills the screen), another is mutilated backstage at a 42nd Street sex club (green and red neon bathes the splayed corpse), two of the pit-stops in Lucio Fulci's American Sodom Tour. The Ripper is "a very superior mind" with a gift for "good, efficient butchery," the voice of misogyny squawking on the phone: "Oh she was beautiful, too beautiful. She was asking for it and I gave it to her, quack quack quack!" The law stumbles in the dark, hiding a copy of Blue Boy between New York Post pages and quoting Verlaine. "In subtlety lies the essence of things... Bullshit!" Edwards' Experiment in Terror figures in the MacGuffin, De Palma's Dressed to Kill is the main object of degradation. Her lust suddenly turned to dread, a hot-to-trot bourgeois fashion-plate extricates herself from the manacles of an afternoon rendezvous only to saunter straight into the maniac's knife. A subway passenger rushes into an empty movie theater, where the grisly attack is backlit against the projector's beam of light before being revealed as a dream. In the show-stopper, the pas de deux between a prostitute and a razor builds excruciatingly to a grindhouse Un Chien Andalou. Frank O'Hara's "path so cut and red" ("Female Torso"), a blood flood with a damaged family at its center. Fincher's Se7en burnishes the grime. With Jack Hedley, Almanta Suska, Howard Ross, Andrea Occhipinti, Alexandra Delli Colli, and Paolo Malco.
--- Fernando F. Croce |