S&A The Voyurism of the Who Done It Slasher - Happy Birthday To Me and The New York Ripper

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, DIR J L THOMPSON, 1981 &
NEW YORK RIPPER DIR LUCIO FULCI 1982

    The Slasher genre has it's roots firmly in the Murder Mystery.  It's the Italian's who give the murder mystery a more kill and gore focus: Blood and Black Lace, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Torso.  Incredibly stylish movies with fashion, wealth and a killer often in black gloves.  What is important, especially for the movies I am going to be talking about; is the camera taking the POV or the Killer POV.  Something the later Slasher genre would take up with gusto, as the 1980s slid into masks and machetes, where the the final girl and  body count was more the primary objective.  At the Slasher's height, in the early 1980s, you see the melding with Giallo, as the two movies Happy Birthday to Me and The New York Ripper shows.  They are both Hodge Podge of Hitchcock, mystery, gore, kills but on completely different spectrum of film making.  One movie is all plot the other is all style.  

    Watching Happy Birthday to Me and The New York Ripper I could not help but notice how each director used the Killer POV.  The First Person POV is a great technique to to make you complicit in what is happening in the movie.  Also it's a great way really get into the voyeurism of cinema.  The likes of Dario Argento, Brian De Palma and John Carpenter's Halloween have turned the Killer POV into an art form.  They use it for the voyeurism, to hide important plot points, a style choice or just to reinforce that we are watching a movie, as self refletive tick.  Violence is part of the cinematic language.  I mean, it's why we go to the movies.  Though warning, I will be spoiling two nearly forty year old movies in this piece.  

    Happy Birthday to Me and The New York Ripper both rely on the Killer POV, for all the reasons I mentioned above.  J. Lee Thompson and Lucio Fluci are both using specific choices in what they are showing, and placing before the camera.  Thompson and Fulci couldn't be more different in directing styles.  Thompson has a reputation for being a man's man's filmmaker for his Cannon/Bronson movies and the original Cape Fear, though, he is more varied, he has been behind the camera for Conquer and Battle for Planet of the Apes as well as the amazing adorable gem What a Way to Go.  Thompson's a point and shoot guy but he knows exactly where to put the camera.  He's becoming one of my favourite journeymen directors.  Lucio Fulci on the other hand, is a director who rarely follows the rules.  His movies are all camera moves zooms and strangeness.  Movies like The Beyond, The City of the Living Dead and Zombie 2 tend to be the most well known.  Once you see a Fulci movie they are burned into your brain, you're not going forget a Zombie fighting a Shark any time soon.

    Happy Birthday to Me is a solid piece of Slasher Cinema.  It starts off strong.    Young Bernadette going to meet her elite social group, known collectively as The Top Ten.  It's a great sequence with our killer stalking and attacking Bernadette.  Thompson really makes use of  The Killer's POV, the camera tracks around corners behind buildings, the camera taking the place of the mysterious killer.  Poor Bernadette is pulled into the back of car and strangled, though escaping she runs around the corning in understandable terror.  She runs into what she thinks is a familiar face.  Oh Bernadette we hardly knew you. 

      Through out Happy Birthday to Me Characters are often talking and looking directly to camera to the auidence.  It brings the audience into the story, making them complicit in the kills as well as hiding the killer from view.  Thompson is primary using the POV technique for plot, how Happy Birthday to Me moves and fits together.  The camera is often used to obscure as it is to engaed, like in Deep Red or the orginal Friday the 13th, using the Killer POV is a great way to hide a killer's itendity and keep the mystery alive untill it is time for the reveal.  

    Yes, Happy Birthday to Me wants to hide the killer.  But is also playing another game, that of is Ginny (played by Melissa Sue Anderson) the killer or is she the Final Girl?  Ginny is the newest member of The Top Ten.  Though, climbing up the social ranks, Ginny has problems, a recipant of experimental brain surgery after an acciendent (was there any other kind in the 1980s?) she has big memory gaps.  Thompson uses the camera not only to hide the killer, but to confuse and to enhance Ginny's state of mind to the audience.  With Ginny's black outs, her Doctor played by Glenn Ford, who is wearing all the gold pushing Ginny to remember her accident and the pranks and stunts her friends are playing,  there's a discombobulated feeling to Happy Birthday to Me.  Thompson was too much of a fuctional directorial to really pull off a surreal dream like movie, but he's great at the individual sequences.  Because of this, added with all important flashback reveals, Happy Birthday to Me feels almost out of order, like Pulp Fiction in tone to a certain extent.  

    The best example of this is when Ginny's friend Alfred fakes his on death, as a goof.  As you do.  Ginny is fragile enough with the amount of disapearences and frackering mind, she no longer knows what is real and what isn't.  The Killer POV only adds to this, we are not sure who's perspective we are meant to be looking through or if we think we do, we don't really know the state of mind behind it.  The movie is a series of fake outs, disco dancing and screaming red herrings.  It can make Happy Birthday to Me feel random.  

    Watching the movie again, I don't you could look back and find the clues nestled in the cracks between the different set pieces and red herrings, when the twist does arrive it feels like it comes out of left field.  In fact I was still surprised to see Ginny walk in holding a birthday cake in front of her horrified Father and murdered friend, and it really feels like a triple wig reveal when the actual Ginny wakes up and pulls off a mask that would make the team of Mission Impossible green with envy.  Anne, the real master mind of this grotesque party went through a lot of trouble to get to this point, I'm not even sure Billy and Stu would have gone this far.  But I have never been in the situation where I wanted to get revenge on my secret half sister, because her mother broke up my parents marriage.  So who am I to judge.  When I watch Happy Birthday to me again, am I going to see the seems that the camera is trying to hide and confuse?  Probaly not, but I am going to enjoy the ride.

    The New York Ripper is a Slasher using the Killer POV, but The New York Ripper is directed by Lucio Fulci who never plays by the rules.  The New York Ripper is meant to be a Hitchcock styled movie, but Fulci is always going to Fulci and it's why we love him.  If Happy Birthday to Me is all plot, The New York Ripper is all style.  An incredibly sleazy style, it's drenched and sticky with it, you need to take a shower afterward.  

    I love the opening shot of The New York Ripper, it sets you up for what you will be in for.  A beautiful shot of the New York skyline in the early 1980s, while a man is walking his dog by the Hudson.  The dog pulls out a decaying hand from the surrounding shrubbery, and Fulci just holds on the image for what feels like a long time.  You can tell a lot about a film maker over which shot they choose their place their name and ownership of the movie over.  I'm just going to leave this picture here.

 

    Fulci's Killer POV feels more omnipotent than Happy Birthday to Me and lot of other Slashers from the time period.  The camera in The New York Ripper lives in the cracks of 42nd Street, in it's flophouses, the subway, Grindhouses, Sex Shows, cafes with toe fucking - before New York Ripper I did not know that was a thing - which you know are never cleaned.  I was excited to see the early 1980's threatre marquees of The Revenge of the Bushido Blade, Final Exam and Danny Steinmann's The Unseen.  Fulci's camera is capturing a very specific time and place of New York in the early 1980s.  It's a world where surreal, art and exploitation meet, the perfect environment for a savage killer to be  stalking the streets and taunting it's victims and police like a duck.  You hear about this when ever The New York Ripper is mentioned, but it's not to you hear the weezing Donald Duck impression as a knife goes toward a frightened woman you really get the fill and surreal impact of it.  It's wild. 

 

    There isn't really one major chracter we follow in New York Ripper, everyone is either a red herring, a victim or even both.  Fulci uses this as a trick of following multiple people around New York, so your never entirely sure who your protagonist is.  Like Happy Birthday to Me, The New York Ripper feels like it's strctured through set pieces.  And also Fulci is also using he camera to obscure and track the killer. However, The New York Ripper feels like a fever dream, since there is really no one strong central character you just wander around New York City, you go where the camera goes.  And Fulci wants to linger in the city and the grime.  I've only seen The New Yorker Ripper once, so I cannot decide if Fulci's camera is the killer or an omnipotent being settling into the sleaze and violence.  From the fingerless man, to Jane who liked to audio record live sex show,s and has foot sex (I don't think I am ever going to get over that scene), to sweet Rosie who was attacked on the train and has halluciations.  It's Rosie where Fulci is really able to just dig into the dream like nature of The New York Ripper.  If I had to pick it's Jack Headley's Police Detective character that keeps coming back to the same thread.

    There are so many interesting choices that Fulci makes with his camera.  Often they do not make sense, narratively but they are obsorbing non the less.  But since we are talking about a Lucio Fulci movie, we have to talk about the gore and violence which Fulci always excelled at.  The New York Ripper can be hard to watch on occasion, Fulci will always hold far too long that is comfortable.  Fulci's camera makes you sit in it, this is a POV that lingers.  It's not exactly voyrism, in the sense of Hitchcock and De Palma, you are complicit, yes, but you see everything and the bodily consequences of what is happening.   There is an argument that The New York Ripper is misogynistic, with naked women often tied to the bed and tortured, even sliced up at one point.  Apparently it was Fulci who came up with some of more of the depraved set pieces, Fulci always felt he was working through shit.  There is nothing I can really say to defend The New York Ripper, it is about dark sexuality and Duck voice is punishing women because his dying daughter will never grow up to be a woman.  But in this there is also a werid freedom to the sexuality, even if it's sleazy and makes you so bad for watching it.  There are a lot of choices Fulci makes in the form and how he moves the movie a long.  There's a flow to how this disparate movie works and because of that it's incrediably engaging and feels like it works as a whole. 

    In both Happy Birthday to Me and The New York Ripper, you are made to watch.  But with how each Thompson and Fulci use their camera to hide and herring what is happening each movie has their own different effect.  Both are also brilliant examples what the Shlasher genre can do.  And the more I disapear into it.  The more I start to see the subtlties of what each movie and I love it more.