“Nobody’s clean,” says detective Al Wheeler (Billy Dee Williams, laying on the malt liquor charm) in Fear City, and as if to hammer home this central point about New Yorkers’ (and, by extension, mankind’s) scuzziness, director Abel Ferrara then has a teenage passerby say something to his friend about a woman and “two on one.” Ah, to be in pre-Giuliani Times Square, home to bums, hookers, drug pushers, and a nunchaku-wielding, manifesto-writing serial killer who prays upon exotic dancers. Kicking things off by raggedly cutting between shots of flashing neon signs and a stage-bound Melanie Griffith (in a role that only superficially recalls her turn in Body Double) flashing her tits to a crowd of unseemly club patrons, Ferrara’s third feature is a structurally messy noir, wasting too much time on repetitive symbolic subplots – namely, flashbacks to the death of a boxer at the hands of Tom Berenger’s Matt Rossie, a former pugilist and current mob-funded stripper agency owner – and only skimming the salacious surface of the lesbian love affair between Griffith’s smack-addicted Loretta and Rae Dawn Chong’s Leila. Still, the film, shot almost completely at night and in almost nothing but dilapidated locales, is so thoroughly drenched in putrid squalor that one can almost smell the stench of garbage littering Manhattan’s cracked sidewalks. And though it never quite congeals into something proficient or profound, Fear City – conveying a sense of inescapable, hopeless physical and moral decay – has a bitterness and cynicism that’s grimily, perversely romantic.
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