THE RIPPER

1888, London is closed in the grip of fear: a trail of horror strikes the Whitechapel district, some prostitutes are massacred and murdered by a madman, a serial killer who strikes with ruthless precision and vanishes into nothingness, losing his trail. The case is entrusted to the best investigator of Scotland Yard who not only will have to stop the relentless killer but also protect his best witness, the woman he has fallen in love with... Another film about the exploits of the one considered, in all respects, the first serial killer in history, the mysterious Jack The Ripper, the Ripper. It is an American television production that is quite mediocre that arrives in Italy with almost five years late, distributed by Universal for the home video market only, and that probably would never have arrived, if it were not pushed by the great success of the stunning "From Hell" of the Hughes brothers. And so here is served another useless, bland and boring historical reconstruction (more or less) of the mysterious murders that bear the signature of Jack the Ripper, on whose trail this time there is not, as one would expect, the transgressive and vicious Inspector Abberline - whom the chronicles of the time indicate as the Scotland Yard detective in charge of the investigations - but an elegant, handsome and ambitious inspector, one Jim Hansen, played by the television "star" Patrick Bergin (recently seen in the role of Count Dracula in the television miniseries "The Kiss of Dracula" produced and broadcast by Rai). The ill-advised and disastrous choice to show right away, from the very first sequences, the true identity of the mad ripper removes from the film that little suspense and curiosity that it could try to maintain. It is already known who is, according to this version of events, the identity of the killer, almost throughout the duration of the film there is no shedding of a single drop of blood, the pace is certainly not fast-paced and the dialogues of the Italian version are rather rough and crude... the result can only be decidedly poor. In the prevailing boredom and absolute, total flatness, only the beautiful presence and discreet performance of the good Gabrielle Anwar ("Body Snatchers" by Abel Ferrara) remain to be saved.