• Directed by Christopher Lewis
• Written by Bill Groves
• Starring
  • Tom Savini
  • Tom Schreier
  • Mona Van Pernis
  • Wade Tower
  • Andrew Adams
• Produced by Linda Lewis
• Executive produced by Bill F. Blair

Because I am a tremendously fair individual (I’m also charming, nice-smelling, and kind to animals), I always try to grade movies on an appropriate curve. The present movie, The Ripper, was made as a follow-up by the same people who brought us Blood Cult (1985), the grandpappy of the direct-to-video feature. Wisely, those worthies realized that simply doing more of the same would not bring them the same level of success; Blood Cult banked hard on its publicity and novelty value, and that’s a nickel that really couldn’t be spent again. So they tried to make a better movie. And, honestly, they succeeded. On a comparable budget ($70,000) and shooting schedule (two weeks), they made a movie that is demonstrably better. Which does not, I hasten to add, mean that it is a “good” movie by any widely-acknowledged scale of reference. But if you, like I, were to watch these movies in relatively quick succession, you would definitely see and appreciate the improvement. It’s not much, but such tiny rewards are the only things that keep me going some days.

Sponsored in part by the Oklahoma Meat Packers Association.

The opening scene takes on the daunting task of having a shooting location in Tulsa, Oklahoma stand in for Whitechapel, circa 1888, as a woman exits a horsedrawn cab at night, waits under a streetlamp for a few minutes, and then flees a stalking figure in cloak and tophat, only to end up on the edge of his blade. Yes, it’s a cliched scene, and that turns out to be the point: University professor Richard Harwell (Tom Schreier) has just started teaching a course on famous crimes in the movies, and he uses that scenario as a specifically “Hollywood-like” treatment of Jack the Ripper-style killings. It seems an odd sort of undergrad course, especially since it doesn’t seem to be tied in to any of the conventional departments like Film Studies or History (Harwell may even be a lit professor, according to a reference to one of his other courses). In any event, he’s got about a dozen students, notable among whom are Steve (Wade Tower) a horror movie maven, and his long-suffering girlfriend Cindy (Andrea Adams).

Harwell also has a significant other, Carol (Mona Van Pernis), a dance instructor on campus. That gives us an opportunity for what we all hope to see in a mid-’80s movie: A bad Flashdance scene! Since Carol’s status as a dancer is never referenced again, the entire point of this scene is to take up as many minutes as possible.

“So tell me, do these stripes make me look fat?”

Which means that, at seventeen minutes in, we’re finally getting close to starting the plot when Harwell and Carol go to an antique store to see the brass bedframe that Carol’s all ga-ga over. While she’s dickering with the owner, Harwell wanders around and finds a huge gaudy gold-and-ruby ring. Bemused, he puts it on, and is overcome with hazy flashbacks of someone getting knifed. He doesn’t decide to buy the ring right away, though — not until he sees a drawing in the book from which he’s teaching of an identical ring that was found at the site of the Ripper’s last murder. (Yes, a clue found in a book illustration was a prominent plot point in Blood Cult, too.)

I should point out that even before Harwell found the ring, there were reports of “Ripper-like” killings in town. And reports is all we get for the first several murders, until we see a cocktail waitress in a dark parking lot being assaulted by a shadowy figure in a cloak and tophat. Harwell’s contribution to the plot is mostly to fall asleep early in the evenings (while watching horror movies) and be out of sorts in class the next day. We spend plenty of “couple time” with Harwell and Carol, as well as with Steve and Cindy, though why they’re of any importance is a mystery for most of the running time. It turns out that Steve becomes a full participant in the plot when (a) he notices that Harwell’s got a new ring and has started using his left hand far more than he used to (the Ripper was left-handed, you know), and (b) a lengthy parking session with Cindy turns bad when he ends up the Ripper’s next victim.

“Okay, name another movie worse than the one we’re in.”

The more I regurgitate this movie for you, the less supportable my above contention of improved quality seems, even to myself. So let me point out the pluses:

The acting is a full order of magnitude better than in Blood Cult. Tom Schreier as Harwell is the best of the lot, as befits the character with the most screen time. And the interactions between the members of our two couples, Harwell/Carol and Steve/Cindy, is surprisingly relaxed and authentic. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that either or both of these were real-life relationships off-set.

The gore FX, when we finally get to them, are pretty decent. Jack the Ripper was known for slitting throats and disemboweling his victims, both of which are effects that are often botched on productions with ten times the budget; here, both effects come across pretty convincingly. (Although I’m still not convinced that a pay telephone cord, when used as a tool of strangulation, would actually cut the throat wide open.)

Possessed by the spirit — of Liberace!

On the other hand, our top-billed star, Tom Savini, only showed up for one day of shooting (no word on whether the stand-in was a chiropractor), and thus in the last five minutes of the movie. Savini’s always had a lot more screen presence than most people give him credit for, but his turn as the spirit of the Ripper is hideously mismanaged. Only with his last victim does he prattle on and on explaining (without really explaining) how his killings give him immortality, in a manner so suave and refined as to be almost fey.

And frankly, the screenplay plants a lot more seeds than it ever intends to harvest. The entire idea of the class examining the inaccuracies in cinematic depictions of crimes goes entirely unused; despite the protestation that the initial scene we were shown exemplified Hollywood’s stylized take on such crimes, every “real” killing we see thereafter follows wholly in its footsteps in terms of style and staging. If there’s a reality to such crimes that horror movies don’t handle well, we really ought not to be informed of that in a movie which isn’t going to handle them any better, or any differently.

Worst Prom photo ever.

The closing scene, in fact, is a concatenation of arbitrary B-movie writing, in which we’re supposed to believe that the simple sight of three cars parked near a closed warehouse will cause a small-town policeman to call massive quantities of backup, all of whom will train their weapons on an open door and then, without any announcement or warning, open fire en masse on an individual who is very obviously unarmed. Makes me wonder why the local police force agreed to appear in the scene, if it was going to portray law enforcement procedure so poorly.

In the end, despite Harwell being the protagonist, he seems oddly self-unaware; there’s never a moment in which he starts to suspect that he might have anything at all to do with the killings. Heck, there’s never even a moment in which he realizes how events around him are starting to resemble the scenario of a horror movie — and if your protagonist is an academic expert in such things, it damned well ought to matter.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 6
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 1
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• visible boom mikes: 2
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0