Interesting movie! Fear City OOZES sleaze... sleaze... sleaze! Also has a great cast and good direction (Abel Ferrara!), but despite the atmosphere it never really comes together into something compelling.
Tom Berenger is a former boxer who now runs strip clubs. One after another, his strippers are attacked by a maniac in increasingly sadistic ways. Billy Dee Williams is the cop who is determined to bring the maniac in. Some of the strippers include a young Melanie Griffith (!), Rae Dawn Chong, and Maria Conchito Alonso.
The movie also has a nice soundtrack, including "New York Doll" by David Johansen, of the... you guessed it, New York Dolls. The New York City of the '80s was still very nasty, and this film really revels in every dark corner, every bared breast, every drunk bum, the trash blowing up and down Times Square, etc.
Supposedly this film was even more violent/gorier, but had to be cut to get an R rating. As a result, some of the killings have really artistic-seeming jump cuts that betray where the original footage was.
Berenger is good in that brooding Berenger kind of way, and Billy Dee Williams is great in that I-don't-take-no-shit kind of NYC cop way. I'm not sure where the disconnect is, but somewhere along the way this movie alienated me and I watched only the surface, not caring about the plot or characters. Fatal flaw.
Released in France a year before the US, I couldn't find any financial data for the movie but I'll bet you a dozen donuts it lost money.
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