Ripper

This film was better than expected and enough of the characters were developed to the point that it was very difficult to guess just who might be the killer. You would make up your mind and then change it over and over again. The violence was not as graphic as it might have been and they spent more time on the characters which is a change. Strong acting from many of the young actors was an unexpected surprise. A cut above the typical teen movie.

Girl-running-in-a-thunderstorm-with-killer-close-behind-girl-trips killer-gets-her kind of story. Lots of blood, no originality. One would expect more from a movie which promises serial psycho killers copying Jack the Ripper. No real motivation for the blood bath, least of all a psychological one. Except for the ending which at least creates a little bit of confusion, one could predict every scene at least 10 minutes before it unfolds. Everything in this movie has been done, redone and overdone. It's like watching Scary Movie and taking it seriously. It's been a real disappointment. Where are the calculated blood thirsty psycho killers? What happened to movies like Seven or Silence of the Lambs, with original plots and motifs? Because personally I'm tired of watching helpless blonds being butchered like cattle while instead of defending themselves they scream in agony and then always manage to trip and fall.

In this one, someone is killing students at a college campus using the same techniques as London's very own Jack the Ripper. The students try and catch him. The audience falls asleep.

This is another misogynist fantasy in which several young women are brutalised by a killer with a stainless steel kitchen knife. One of the suspects looks and acts like a young Bobcat Goldthwaite, Bruce Payne proves once again that he's Britain's most embarrassing export since Julian Sands, and Jurgen Prochnow, as a twitchy detective, continues his regrettable career slide. Rubbish.

Oh, and although I'm no expert on the history of serial killers, I think I can safely say that Jack the Ripper never ran any of his victims over in a jeep.

Molly Keller (A. J. Cook), the only survivor of a violent massacre when she was sixteen, is now a student enrolled in a forensic science course at Berkeley. When her fellow classmates start dying at the hands of a mystery killer, who is following the modus operandi of the infamous Jack the Ripper, she suspects that the murderer from her past is back to finish the job.

Molly and the remaining students from her study group pool their profiling talents in an attempt to discover the identity of the maniac.

Director John Eyres directs this slab of stalk 'n slash with both eyes firmly fixed on the teen market, and what may have been a nice addition to the genre becomes an annoying and unwatchable piece of garbage due to its MTV trappings. So obnoxious are the trendy narcissistic teens that make up teacher Marshall Kane's (Bruce Payne) class of wannabe Clarice Starlings, that you'll find yourself rooting for the killer. Main character Molly is perhaps the most annoying character of all; her emotionally troubled, spunky, grunge-chic heroine is carefully designed to appeal to the widest possible teenage demographic; angst-ridden loners, trendy fashion followers, horny guys—she's supposed to appeal to them all. Well I'm not a teenager anymore, and I hated her with a passion! And while I'm having a rant about the students, could someone please explain to me how they all became so damn erudite. From hacking into a police computer undetected, to conducting an autopsy, to fixing a satellite dish, nothing seemed to be beyond their capabilities.

And now onto the death scenes. The first murder is the most impressive—a multiple stabbing followed by defenestration—and it is also the bloodiest. The rest of the killings are relatively gore free and disappointing. The nastiest deaths actually occur by accident, when two characters fall in front of the whirring buzz blades of a sawmill.

Toward the end of this drivel, which at 115 minutes is way too long, I gave up following the ludicrous plot. There was some rubbish about the victims sharing the same initials as those killed by Jack the Ripper, a pointless (non-explicit) sex scene, and various characters were revealed as red herrings. The finale is completely confusing and I ended up unsure as to who the killer really was.

Apparently, the director deliberately wanted the ending to be ambiguous, with the viewer making their own mind up about who was responsible. Well I'm not going to be ambiguous about what I think of this film—it was awful.

This is another one let down by some horrible acting from certain cast members and some clunky script work.

Story wise I really enjoyed it. It's the sort of film that in the right hands would of been great but it got someone elses hands so it was more just ok.