The Ripper Untold



AKA: Ripper Untold

A killer is stalking the streets of Whitechapel, butchering women, and calling himself Jack the Ripper. With bodies mounting and at a loss for clues, the detective on the case must team up with the medical examiner to try to discern who the killer is. Except one of them is potentially hiding a dark and deadly secret.



Can you tell that after a month of watching these movies that I’ve kinda run out of interesting ways to summarize the same damn plot? If not, know that I have. Because there’s only so many ways you can re-write “Killer stalks London. Police baffled” over and over again while trying to make it still sound interesting. Clearly, I would have never made a good tabloid headline writer. Boy am I glad this month is OVER and I can go back to writing summaries about other killers stalking and killing people in various locales with equally inept police officers and…. Hey, wait a sec….

Oh hell with it, I’m getting off track.

ANYWAY, to finish out my Ripper month, I decided to watch a newer Ripper-related movie, and The Ripper Untold fit the bill. The film is a British crime/mystery/thriller/thing-a-ma-bobber from 2021 from writer and director Steve Lawson, whose other notable credits include such classics as Hellriser and KillerSauras. Two films that sound like they were tailor-made for something like the SYFY channel, but in fact were not, because from the looks of it, all of his films look like they were too low-budget even for that network. Looking at his filmography, Ripper Untold is actually one of his higher rated productions, topping out with a current 4.1 score on IMDB. But looking at some of the complaints of his other movies, this one still seems to suffer from many of the same issues that plague his other movies.



Honestly though, the movie itself isn’t that bad. I mean, it’s not all that good either, but I wouldn’t necessarily consider it to be, like, bad-bad. The costuming is nice, and while I don’t know how “authentic” it is, it at least looks decent. The film was actually shot in (or at least around) London, so there’s some nice authenticity there. And they (mercifully) had a decent camera at their disposal, so everything looks nice and clean and crisp, and it even sports a couple of nice camera angles. So overall at least the film looks very nice.



But when I say it looks “nice” you also have to know that I’m kinda grading on a curve. Because yeah, it does look nice, but what I mean by that is that it looks nice from a very low-budget perspective. Which means that the film also suffers from a lot of the painful hallmarks of the incredibly, obvious low “we only had £500 to work with” budget. Which, in fairness, can make a film bad, but at least here you can tell that everyone was at least trying. The acting is amateurish and there are at least a couple of occasions where you can tell that doing one more take could have helped. But it’s also decent enough to get the job done and I don’t feel like anyone outright sucks. They may have blissfully had a decent camera, but they also only had a handful of filming locations to work with, so you can expect to see the same 5 or 6 locations over and over (and over) again, and that can get highly tedious, not to mention boring. They also liked to reuse a couple of establishing shots too, so that’s fun…


Okay, it’s a nice fence. But the least you could have done was shoot it from a different angle. I didn’t need to see it three times.

That said, there are two decently sized dings against the film.

The first, is that I assume Lawson is a Christopher Nolan fan, because the damn volume of the dialogue in this film was way too low. I kept having to turn it up in order to hear what some people were saying. And that’s after I had to turn it up to begin with, because the volume on Tubi is already annoyingly lower than most of the other apps I use. So I had to double turn it up. And then I forgot I had to do that, so when I went to watch something else I got blasted by the first thing I put on. So, bah humbug to the filmmakers who do that shit. Do your audiences a favor and go take an audio mixing class or something so you can STOP DOING THAT.



But the film’s major issue is the story, and my complaint with that comes in two-fold. The first, is that this is yet another movie about “Jack the Ripper” that isn’t actually about Jack the Ripper. Well, it is, but not really. They use the name and they use the same (accurate!) methods of death, but beyond that any historical accuracy is pretty much thrown out the window. The victims’ names are altered to be similar to the real victims, but different enough not to be the same. Locations are similar, but again, not quite right (the last victim dies in a room, but it’s a room in a brothel, when in reality she died in her own apartment.) The timetable is rushed so that everything happens in a matter of 3-4 days, as opposed to the months in which the crimes actually occurred. And, for some reason, the number of victims has been whittled down from 5 to 4, and the only conceivable reason I can think of for that is that the filmmakers couldn’t find another actress willing to play a topless dead corpse. So for “Ripperologists” or history fans, this movie will almost certainly give you a damn headache.



And the second half of the story-issue is that… Well, how do I put this nicely…. Eh, screw it: the story’s kinda boring. Basically, this poor movie could have probably benefited from about a dozen or more rewrites. Now, the idea behind it is sound. I like that and can see what they were aiming for. But ultimately there’s just too much miscellaneous fluff here for the movie’s own good. It’s trying to be more of a detective story than a horror one and, you know what, that’s cool. I can dig that. But then they spend WAY too much time focusing on that, and not enough time on the other, arguably more interesting, parts of the story, and I’m afraid the movie suffers for it. I mean, in most cop shows interrogations are meant to be tense and fun, but here they’re almost played out in real-time and feel like a slog. There’s even a long, drawn out conversation between the detective and the medical examiner at one point where the detective basically spends close to five minutes demanding the other man contribute ideas on who the killer may be, and the whole scene somehow manages to be both terribly dull and almost hysterical, because you can tell the medical guy DOES NOT want to be there. Like, he just wants to go home, eat his crappy dinner and go to bed. But no, now he’s stuck in this awkward conversation with his coworker. My sympathies, bud. We’ve all been there. The sad part though, is that I think this was meant to be one of those ‘fun/tense’ scenes, because at this point the medical guy kinda thinks he might be blacking out and killing these ladies, but the movie has so clearly telegraphed the actual killer somewhere in the first five minutes, making all of these various conversations feel utterly pointless. Like, even people who are watching this while fiddling on their phones know who the real killer is. You’ve already given away the twist, guys. You can stop now.



Hmmm, uh, yeah. I’ll give Ripper Untold a gold star for effort, I suppose. Cause at the very least they were really trying with this one. You can tell. But the pacing sucks and the story is too predictable, it’s not at all historically accurate, and I’m pretty sure at least one of those victims still had a noticeable pulse so… Let’s just say mistakes were made. There is a lot of blood and boobs, and at least one sex scene for those who are interested in that. But if you’re looking for something with a good story, then this one will leave you unimpressed.

Ripper Untold is available on a variety of streaming services.

Ripper Untold is also available on DVD.

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