My review of The New York Ripper is online at FilmFreakCentral.net:

Fulci's killer stalks New York women and mutilates them with an unmistakably sexual aggression, although he's apparently not a rapist. He's a stock genre character except for one thing: he talks like Donald Duck, complete with frenzied quacking noises.

Picks up where the previous film left off, this time with action hero Chev Chelios lighting out from his hospital bed to replace the plastic hunk of junk inside his chest with the real, beating heart that's been stolen from him by gangsters. The result is, once again, simultaneously parody and quintessence of the contemporary action movie, pushed through a fuzzbox and amplified to the point of distortion. I like the Neveldine/Taylor brand of mayhem well enough that I really wish so much of what's going on here didn't feel so, well, smarmy. It's not the sex and the violence that I mind, but the targeted crassness — the joke about the horse cock is one thing, the outrageous racial and gender stereotypes another thing entirely. In some ways, this movie almost exists beyond prejudice, with its outsized offensiveness calling attention to itself sheerly for purposes of mockery. For all its super-charged action and good humor, I couldn't completely dispel the whiff of chauvinism that hung about this thing, and it left me a little unsettled.

Simultaneously a tough guy and a sap, a realist and a romantic, director Michael Mann has for decades now been making movies about what it means to be a man. He chooses to tell these stories in familiar settings, setting his fairly measured character studies in the kind of testosterone-soaked milieu that has been favored by a century of manly filmmakers. Mann has made movies about cops and robbers. There's one about a cab driver and an assassin, one about a whistleblower and another about a great athlete. He's even made a supernatural horror movie set among Nazis. But he keeps returning to the subject of heroes and villains, about the role-playing that takes place when good guys go head-to-head with bad guys, and about what happens when the line between antagonist and protagonist gets blurred.