Review of Fear City (1984) by Ola G — 19 Feb 2015

A serial killer and an expert on martial arts is preying on strippers in Manhattan's Times Square in New York. Night after night, he visits smoky strip clubs, waiting for his victims and then randomly slashing and killing them. Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) is a former boxer trying to escape his past whom is currently employed at a talent agency which caters exotic dancers to mafia-controlled strip clubs all over Manhattan. Matt and his business partner, Nicky Parzeno (Jack Scalia), are relentlessly dogged by Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams), a persistent police detective on the case of the murdered strippers, and is hoping to find something to nail both Matt and Nicky on. Matt is trying at the same time to reconcile with his former flame, Loretta (Melanie Griffith), whom also works as a dancer. With the police constantly hounding them, and under pressure from the mob to do something about the killings, Matt must somehow face his inner demons to find the killer before he strikes again...

"Fear City" is a low budget b-movie thriller from Abel Ferrara adding a mix of sex, nudity and violence to portray Times Square in the early 80´s, but at the same time he was most certainly looking for tabloid headlines and shock value to get an audience in the cinemas. The movie was originally made by 20th Century-Fox, but they decided that it had too much nudity, sex, violence and drug references for them, so they sold it to the independent Aquarius Releasing. Compared to Ferrara´s quite disturbing, but much more effective and visual "Ms. 45" (1981), this follow up is pretty disappointing. First of all the antagonist, the so called Karate killer makes no sense in my book. I guess due to the success of several martial arts movies back then, they decided that the killer should use martial arts and some how connect his killings to a cleaning of both himself and the city of New York in an eastern philosophical way. Did it work? No. Despite some ok names in the main roles (Berenger, Williams etc), I hardly believe any of them feel all that happy about their performances in this film. Melanie Griffith has never been a very good actress and "Fear City" doesn´t change that fact. It was however nice to see some old 80´s crushes passing by in the shape of Rae Dawn Chong and María Conchita Alonso. Abel Ferrara is good at showing the sleezy side of NYC and that has partly become his brandmark. But, he is quite uneven as a director, and this is a good example of the downside of his profession. The acting is so so, the dialogue so so, the action pretty ridiculous. But, you get a glimpse of some ok tension/ drama once in a while in the film. Nice to have seen it, but "Fear City" is hardly something you would see twice.