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Jack the Ripper [1976] Another mad surgeon, played with cold-eyed fury by the inimitable Klaus Kinski, is the guilty party in this Euro-horror take on the case. Maddened because his mother was 'a whore', this doctor owes a lot to the Ripper of The Lodger as he does charity work for poor patients while avoiding the romantic attentions of his admiring landlady before traipsing out onto the streets of London to abduct victims, whom he rows across a lake [!] to an apothecary's gardens maintained by his accomplice, a simple-minded woman, and carries out gruesomely explicit dissections. However, the sensitive nose of a blind beggar catches a trace of a rare herb on the killer's clothes, enabling the cop on the case [Andreas Mannkopf] to rush to the rescue when the murderer has abducted his girlfriend, a ballet dancer [Josephine Chaplin] upon whom the Ripper has a part-time crush but who has unwisely dressed up as a tart to do some amateur sleuthing. Shot mostly in Zurich, with a few shots of London edited in by someone
who didn't know that a crest with ER on it should have had VR on it
for the 1888 setting, this is one of those pictures [see also the Jekyll-and-Jack
drama Edge of Sanity] that presents a bewilderingly surreal vision of
the geography of Victorian London, not to mention a lumpen, Teutonic
version of saucy music hall performance. Jesus Franco, the prolific
Spaniard, has the benefit of a magnetic leading man and some locations
that may not be authentic but at least provide some period gloom, and
there's a strange disjunction between the old-fashioned, Edgar Wallace-style
plotting and the very 1970s horror-gore effects. It's too draggy to
work as really lurid melodrama, and the police investigation scenes
are deadweight - but, trust me, it's one of Franco's better post-1970
credits. First Published In: Ripperologist Visit Kim's Official Website at www.johnnyalucard.com
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