The Ripper



Richard Harwell is a college professor who is currently teaching a class on how movies portray various crimes. His first example? One of the most notorious series of crimes of all, those of Jack the Ripper. While out shopping with his girlfriend he happens to come across a possible connection to his current syllabus: an odd looking ring that he suspects once belonged to the famed serial killer himself. Initially Richard thinks it just looks like a gaudy piece of junk. But he quickly finds himself mysteriously drawn to the shiny piece of bling, even though his discovery of it coincides with him suddenly suffering from highly disturbing nightmares and a series of horrific local murders that the police are calling reminiscent of Jack the Ripper’s crimes. Richard just chalks everything up to coincidence, but as the local murders continue to grow worse and he starts acting strangely, one of the students in his class is beginning to suspect something very sinister is going on.


He’s so stealthy…

Oh, dear…. Where to start?… I guess at the beginning, because… Yowser…..

The Ripper is an American slasher/supernatural horror film from 1985 directed by Christopher Lewis. Lewis was the son of actress Loretta Young, and understandably spent much of his life around the film industry, attending USC film school with the likes of George Lucas. But in the 1980s he was living in Tulsa with his wife, where they worked in newspapers and promotions, often doing press covering various films. But what they really wanted to do was to make their own films, and in 1985 they released Blood Cult, their first foray into the horror genre. Blood Cult had the distinction of being one of the first “shot-on-video” films released to the then burgeoning video rental market, and as a result was heavily promoted, despite receiving rather crap-tastic reviews. But it netted the Lewis’s a tidy sum in profits, so of course they hoped to repeat that success, and thus we have their second film: The Ripper. Ripper ends up being a bit better than their first film, but only marginally so. Its greatest distinction is that it features gore extraordinaire Tom Savini as Jack the Ripper. And if you find yourself wondering what he thought about the film, then you should probably know that at a Fangoria convention in 1996, he reportedly got down on his knees and begged people for forgiveness for being involved in its production. That’s the quality of film we’re working with here.


Excuse me? Can I switch to a different film project for the month? I’m already having regrets.

Now, to the film’s credit, it does get at least two things right, to varying degrees of success. The first is that they actually shot the college portions of the film on the actual college campus of the University of Oklahoma (also in Tulsa, I suspect Lewis didn’t like to travel far…). So at the very least all the actual school scenes were shot at an actual school, so at least the viewer isn’t subjected to scenes shot at random-ass locations with the filmmakers trying to write them off as educational institutions. Of course, this point is then mitigated by the fact that most of the students we see all look like they’re pushing thirty, despite still being called “kids” at every conceivable opportunity. So there’s that. But hey, if you tell yourself they’re all adults taking night classes, maybe you can overlook it.


You gotta love some of the ways movie makers try to make older people look young and “hip”.

And the other tic in its favor? The gore, which is actually surprisingly well done. Although, no, it wasn’t done by Tom Savini, despite his (apparently disgraceful) involvement in the film. Tom was only flown out to Tulsa for one night to shoot his scenes and that’s it. Instead they were mostly done by David Powel and Robert Brewer, both of whom only seem to have worked with Lewis on his other two films, Mutilations and… one of them seems to have worked on Terror at Tenkiller (gag!). None of which are well known, or particularly good films. But (!) their work here is decent, including some very realistic looking throat cutting, disembowelment, and one instance of finger slicing, so the gore-hounds at least should be happy enough. Downside though? What’s here is actually 99% throat cutting and disembowelment. So the film’s kinda like a one trick pony in that regard. They only did one thing, but in their favor they did it well, so I’ll only take a couple points off their final score. Those viewers looking for variety however, are going to be bummed.



But then that leaves us with the rest of the movie and it’s… Not great, I’m not gonna lie. It’s the kind of movie where you’re either going to be highly amused by all their questionable choices or want to bang your head against the wall. And the weirdness starts right off the bat in the opening flashback scene, where in the dead of night an unnamed woman hurriedly insists on getting out of a carriage in the bad part of town, as if she has somewhere very important she has to be, and then just awkwardly stands around for a full minute or so (right next to this really bright incandescent light that’s supposed to be something from 1888), giving plenty of time for ole’ Jack to slowly meander his way over in her general direction. Like, what the hell was your hurry, Lady? Presuming she was a prostitute, there wasn’t like there was anyone around for her to proposition, so what was the rush? Were you just that eager to be killed? Just liked to watch the moths hover around the lamplight? What was your thought process here?


Gods that light’s BRIGHT!

But of course it doesn’t end there. A few minutes later, after we’ve skipped ahead a whole century, we’re treated to some…dancing, because Richard’s girlfriend Carol is the school’s theatre director (or something, I don’t know). And I know it’s supposed to be some kind of choreographed dance they’ve just learned (on the first day of school? Carol’s a real ball-buster), but everyone involved is decked out in cut-offs and brightly colored leotards and doing a lot of long, stretchy motions, so instead of a dance all I can think is that it looks like some jazzercise class just spontaneously broke out on stage. It’s so weird. And then later Carol is dancing in a dream sequence, and then one of Richard’s students awkwardly slow dances and makes out with his lady love out in the middle of the woods for WAY too long, and at this point I’m starting to suspect that somebody on staff had a very peculiar obsession that they insisted on subjecting all the innocent viewers to against their will.


Doesn’t this look like an exercise routine? It’s not just me, right?

Then there’s the whole thing surrounding Jack the Ripper’s famous ring. You guys have heard about the infamous ring right? The one that was supposedly found at a crime scene and then mysteriously “lost”? If not, then I’m supremely disappointed, because I haven’t heard about it either and I was hoping one of you could clue me in. It just seems like an odd thing to focus the movie around, is all. Like, a knife or a hat, sure. I’d get that. We know he had those. But a ring? Why? And why did they have to use the gaudiest one they could find? This thing looks like some prize you got out of a vending machine for a quarter when you were five. Or one of those candy ring pops they used to sell that advertised flavors, but ended up tasting more like pure sugar than anything else. And they also never really explained how the whole possession thing worked either. Is it some sort of ancient curse? Did Jack somehow set it up himself, and if so, how? Basically there’s a lot of questions surrounding this crappy looking bauble that are never answered, and I’m a little miffed about it.



Then there are the film’s many (many) other plot-related issues. One of the bigger ones being how Jack only killed prostitutes, yet here he doesn’t seem to care who he knocks off. Theatre gal, waitress, doesn’t seem to matter to him. And the film recognizes this and tries to brush it off by showing us a picture of a Victorian prostitute and goes “oh, well, it’s a different era now and all the ladies dress like prostitutes these days”, before cutting to a bunch of woman (some of whom I suspect didn’t know they were being filmed) who are dressed in outfits that look absolutely nothing like the picture, while both the professors having this discussion nod along like “yup, I can see that, sure”. But the best part of that little bit of casual misogyny, is that when Jack finally shows up, he admits that he knew none of his victims were prostitutes and was killing whoever he wanted this time. So that earlier bit of sexist drivel ends up being nothing more than an annoying time waster.


It’s, like, totally lames-ville, man.

And really, the film does a great job of wasting time in general. One would think that with a story-line surrounding murder, possession and prophetic dreams, that there would be a focus on solving the mystery of who the killer is, and even scenes of Richard questioning his sanity when his disturbing dreams end up mimicking reality. But none of that happens. The only deep thinking Richard does is whining about how he’s suddenly suffering from insomnia. We spend 10x more time being forced to watch long scenes of Richard’s students mack out on the couch and be all lovey-dovey kissy-facey, than we do seeing Richard dealing with the new weirdness in his life that he seems perfectly happy to ignore.


Oh, if only that poster would come to life and shoot them…

And the only time you see the police is when they show up and act almost comically incompetent, like when the killer literally runs across the road in front of one of them and their only response to the distraught boyfriend asking for help and telling him who it is, is to stare at the “kid” blankly and go “Huh? Who? Slow down.” He only jumps into action when the boyfriend gets fed up with his nonsense and chases after the killer himself. THEN suddenly it’s lights and sirens time, as if it took a full two minutes for the information that the killer the whole town was looking for was RIGHT THERE to reach his brain. And you get to see their incompetence again at the end for the big finale. Not because anyone called them, or they even knew what was going on, but because they saw a couple of cars illegally parked on the road. THAT apparently required their full attention.


Killer runs by you? Call for backup only after he’s gotten away. See three illegally parked cars? CALL THE ENTIRE POLICE FORCE!

And that doesn’t even touch upon the film’s smaller oddities, like why Carol is obsessed with a single-sized brass headboard, when she clearly has at least a full, yet she gets it anyway (and then it ends up being so small that they had to hang the tiny thing on the wall behind the bed just so you can see it. It’s hysterical.) Nor do we know what Steve and Cindy were doing out in the middle of the woods on a deserted road to begin with, or why the film seems so obsessed with showing the viewer every facet of their love lives when they have zero chemistry with one another.


AH-HAHAHAHA!

But one of my favorites is that Steve, upon seeing his professor with the famous ring, immediately suspects that Richard has become possessed by Jack the Ripper. Like, that’s his first thought. Not that Richard has gone off the deep end because of the class he’s teaching. No, he immediately jumps to “he’s acting funny, so… he must be possessed by a famous serial killer! That’s it!” I mean, WE know he’s right, but there’s no way at that point that he should think that, because what sane person would? Some of the random leaps of logic this film makes are just wild. And I’m tempted to blame the film’s writer, but if you go on IMDB and check out the reviews of this film, someone professing to be the writer is basically on there saying “Nope. That wasn’t me… That wasn’t me either… I don’t know where they got that…” So I suspect ole’ Lewis may be to blame for more of the film’s randomness than he ever let on.


I mean, he did self-promote his own movie in there, so it wouldn’t surprise me.

Okay, at this point this thing is getting about twice as long as I usually make them. So I’m not gonna go into detail about the sub-par acting, or how the cinematography is okay, but also reminiscent of old TV shows and movies. Because I could, but I’m not, but I do want you to know it’s there (thankfully the sound’s okay though). Which means that beyond a couple of nice gore shots and genuine location shooting, The Ripper suffers on just about every level. I’ll give them points for the decent base concept, because in theory it does sound kinda entertaining. And while I was very, VERY entertained, I doubt it was for any of the reasons they were aiming for. They might have actually been able to salvage most (okay, some) of it if they had focused on the main story, but instead the movie just meanders far too much by getting distracted with various subplots and other…randomness. Like spending way too much time on Richard and Steve’s love lives and their obsession with movies, including mentioning both Murder by Decree and The Lodger, two other Ripper related movies! Personally I think it’s a rather bold move to remind viewers that there are actually movies out there a lot better than the one they’re watching, but to each their own, I suppose. Then again, Lewis managed to shove a reference to his own Blood Cult in here too (for several minutes!), so clearly the man didn’t have any shame. But then again, I guess neither did I, because I watched The Ripper. So if YOU have shame, by all means go watch a better Ripper movie. But if you don’t, or you just like a challenge, grab a bottle of liquor and give this one a whirl and be prepared to sit through riveting scenes of jazzercise and characters discussing television programing and VCR recording.

The Ripper is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Ripper is also available on DVD and Bluray.

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