Ripper, The (1985)
* 1/2 (out of 4)
This here was one of the first movies to be produced in order to go straight to video with the director's Blood Cult being considered the very first. The film tells the story of a professor (Tom Schreier) who buys the ring of Jack the Ripper and soon afterwards women start turning up with their throats slashed and guts ripped out. This was a very popular and rather infamous rental back in the day but it's pretty much been forgotten since then. I hadn't seen the film in nearly twenty-years and my memories of it were pretty bad but this viewing really didn't come off as bad as I thought it would. There's no question that the film is bad but I was rather shocked to see how well it actually is considering there really wasn't anything for the director to work off of. In other words, I've seen countless direct to VHS (or now DVD) titles that were cheap and poor but it's rather neat seeing such an early example and notice that it's better than a lot of what followed. The biggest problem is that the film runs 104-minutes, which is at least twenty-minutes too long. The actual story is an interesting one and one that could work but not at the long running time. Another problem is that the film spends way too much time with one of the professor's students and his girlfriend. Both of the actors are very bad so why so much time was spent with them is beyond me. Gore master Tom Savini gets top billing but he only appears in one scene playing the spirit of Jack the Ripper.
