Considered a horror movie, I'd call this a serial killer detective story featuring tons of sex and nudity, a good deal of torture porn, and lots and lots of gore. This is an unrated movie from the early 80s so be warned: some scenes were pretty tough to watch. The buddy that picked the movie said this stuff was pretty standard for the director, Lucio Fulci.

I thought Fulci did a great job portraying a grim, gritty NYC of the time: graffiti and trash everywhere in the street and subway scenes, clean university campus scenes, the Twin Towers always somewhere in the background... The disco / weird-electronic-jazz music really nailed the overall feel of the movie as well. The movie does drag though, and bad... there were several scenes that lasted way too long and really screwed up the pacing.

Given all the above I'd say this was just an okay detective story that took far too long to finish and had too much torture/gore: I'd only give this one star, BUT...

The villain. OMG, the villain. It's not spoiling anything to say this as it's in the trailers: the villain talks like Donald Duck.

[spoiler]There's this scene that's a close up of the detective's face. He's on the phone with the killer, who is describing how the detective's recently abducted girlfriend is going to die... The detective has this look of absolute horror on his face while, essentially, Donald Duck describes how the girlfriend is going to die in horrible pain.

W.T.F.[/spoiler]
Add this one hilariously absurd ingredient into the otherwise completely serious mix of mystery, gore, and sex... Wow. Added a point to the movie and made me curious about other Fulci movies.