Somebody is assaulting
and murdering New York strippers, using martial arts skills and a variety
of blades – ranging from a straight razor
to a samurai sword – to perform his grisly deeds.
The girls all
work for the Starlite Talent Agency, one of the town’s two main
suppliers of showgirls to the Times Square nudie bar circuit, and this
is a major cause of concern for Starlite’s co-owner, Matt Rossi
(Tom Berenger). An ex-boxer who quit the ring after beating one of his
opponents into a fatal coma, Matt’s concerns are amplified by the
fact that he’s still in love (albeit a sort of monosyllabic brutish
man-love) with their star stripper, Loretta.
Cue Melanie Griffith, daughter of The Birds star Tippi Hedren, and at
27 already a veteran of numerous TV movies. As Fear City’s Loretta
it’s hard to imagine a sleazier role for a young actress to play.
She’s a stripper. Actually a bisexual stripper. A bisexual junkie
stripper, truth be told. And she’s being stalked by a karate-kicking
maniac. Somehow “Working Girl” just doesn’t begin to
cover it.
Of course, the sleaze is hardly surprising, given that Fear City came
from the hands of Abel Ferrara who had already wallowed in the gory murk
of New York for such classic exploitation vehicles as Driller Killer
and Ms. 45. Heavily inspired by the gruesome Italian “Giallo” thrillers
of Dario Argento and filmed on location long before New York cleaned
up its act, you can practically smell the piss and vomit as Matt sulks
around the squalid neon-lit corners of the city trying to find the lunatic
who’s running him out of business. Make no mistake, this is a movie
that dips your eyeballs in grime and then offers to wipe them clean with
an oily rag.
After numerous lingering montages of striptease acts and violent assault,
the killer finally makes the mistake of going after Loretta as she tries
to score a hit of smack, distraught that her lesbian lover has fallen
victim to his blade. She maces him in the face, but the maniac just keeps
on coming. Just when all seems lost,
Matt appears at the end of the alleyway like a Wild West gunslinger and
so begins one of the great high concept fight scenes in the annals of
exploitation cinema – angry and lethal ex-boxer versus angry and
psychotic karate killer.
After punching
and kicking seven shades of shit out of each other for several savage
minutes, something inside Matt’s
cabbaged brain snaps and he simply pummels the murderer to death with
his bare hands.
As any woman will tell you, this sort of alpha male display is, like,
totally hot and so Loretta swoons into the arms of her burly vigilante
hunk, all thoughts of slashed lesbian lovers disappearing like last
night’s
g-string. Snuggling up in the back of a cop car, the happy pair drive
off together into the piss and vomit stained New York sunrise. Beautiful.
Need to know: The detective assigned to the case, an
ex-vice cop with obvious distaste for Rossi’s line of work, was
played by Lando himself, Billy Dee Williams, and in the original trailer
the
movie was marketed as a straight crime thriller with Billy Dee as the
star. Among the girls slashed to ribbons are Rae Dawn Chong, who played
a lovestruck gargoyle in Tales From The Darkside: The Movie (see: Julianne
Moore) and Maria Conchita Alonso, who co-starred in Vampire’s
Kiss (see: Nicolas Cage).
Fear City has also been known to go by the
rather
self-explanatory title of Ripper.
Availability: Fear City can be found on budget DVD.
