Son of Sam watches them, but when another couple pulls up behind their car, flashing their lights and honking their horn, Vinny and Chiara drive off, embarrassed.

When Vinny picks up Dionna back at the club, she notices the smell of vaginal lubrication on his face and realizes he had sex with Chiara but does not let on that she knows.

The religious and guilty Vinny, realizing he could have been a victim, decides that God spared him in order to give him a chance to reform his ways and stop cheating on his wife.

She learns that he makes money by erotic dancing and prostituting himself at a gay theater but remains loyal to him and begins to dress in punk fashion herself.

Vinny and Dionna instead go to Studio 54, where they are denied entry and finally end up at Plato's Retreat where they take drugs and participate in an orgy.

Vinny begins to drink, uses drugs and makes a scene at Gloria's hair salon, causing her to angrily throw him out and then inform Dionna about their affair.

Joey T and his gang decide that the latest witness sketch of Son of Sam released by the police resembles Ritchie and attempt to track him down at CBGB.

[5] Journalist Jimmy Breslin, to whom the real Son of Sam sent letters during the time of the murders, appears as himself introducing and closing the film.

Although most of the Son of Sam murders actually took place in Queens, the double shooting that Vinny narrowly escapes has been called an accurate depiction of the April 1977 killing of Alexander Esau and Valentina Suriani in the Bronx.

[6] The sex orgy scene at Plato's Retreat included more explicit shots in the original cut but was edited after the MPAA threatened the film with an "NC-17" rating.

"[14] In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave it three-and-a-half out of four stars and regarded the screenplay as more of "an analytical outsider's view" of provincial scapegoating rather than "the inside, autobiographical job of a Martin Scorsese film".

[15] He added Summer of Sam "vibrates with fear, guilt and lust", and that the film is "not about the killer, but about his victims—not those he murdered, but those whose overheated imaginations bloomed into a lynch mob mentality.

Many critics objected to its handling of sexual themes, its pervasive street language, and "what some saw as [Lee's] bitterly negative and even defamatory representations of white ethnic culture".