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The infamous Italian director Lucio Fulci created many of horror and exploitation cinema’s most memorable and vivid visions of the supernatural, sadistic and salacious. Zombi 2, The Beyond, City of the Living Dead, The House by the Cemetery and more left an indelible impression on the minds of many an impressionable youth. The Italian Death Metal band Fulci were so possessed by their countryman’s work, they named the band after him, with each album being a concept and tribute based on one of his films.
For the band’s 4th bloodthirsty full length, and first for 20 Buck Spin after a steadily growing profile in the Death Metal underground over the last several years, Fulci presents ‘Duck Face Killings’, a homage to one of Lucio’s most depraved and reviled films, ‘The New York Ripper’. In his book ‘Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci’ author (and one time Coil member) Stephen Thrower says “"The New York Ripper is a nihilistic vision of Hell on Earth. No-one matters. No-one cares [...] Fulci's film offers a powerful vision of a world where love has curdled away into poison and death. Life goes on alright, as the soundtrack suggests over the credits, with its 'just another day in the Big Bad Apple' inflection and junk-funk facelessness: but in a climate of absolute zero." Perhaps only the director’s most ardent apologists can confess to a guilty pleasure in the film.
Musically Fulci unleash a barrage of captivatingly gruesome riffs, gory pummeling, murderous slams, low-pitched guttural vocal patterns, and eerie intros and interludes. The band’s songwriting is consciously fixated on creating the most violent and sharpened music possible to convey the films extreme savagery, imagining a soundtrack for the most grisly and cynical slasher flick ever made. There’s a lot of luscious meat on these bones, dripping with hooks and all the colors of Lucio Fulci’s eccentric cinema of cruelty, while the psychotic killer hunts his victims with remorseless perversity and sick gratification, inexplicably quacking in a duck’s voice throughout…
One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and such is the case with a film as sordid and odious as ‘The New York Ripper’. Described by the British Board of Film Classification’s Carol Tpolski as “simply the most damaging film I have ever seen in my whole life”, it was banned in the UK upon its 1982 release for the next 20 years. With ‘Duck Face Killings’, Fulci’s brutal delivery and graphic depiction of their mentor’s violent world shines like the glimmer of blood under the NYC street lights, shocking and wild. A testament to the controversial master in all its decadent guts and degenerate glory.
