cinema history class: jack the ripper

Session: Saucy Jack, Week 3
Movie: Jack the Ripper (1976)
Directed by Jesus Franco

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Plot:
In London, a doctor is killing prostitutes while a policeman, his ballerina girlfriend and a blind man are hot on the case. Horror ensues.

Reaction and Other Folderol:

There were a lot good things in this movie. This featured vivid colors and some really great cinematography. Sure, there's no way that rural idyll could have been the River Thames, but that's forgivable. The lively cabaret music (a bit of which you can see in the trailer above) helped set the lively pace.

Kinski, one of the creepiest actors to have become a star, was well cast as Dr. Orloff/Jack. He is disturbingly believable in the sexual scenes as well as the violent scenes (and, it should be noted, there is plenty of overlap between those two categories). It was fun to watch the blind man providing the police the leads they needed, in a modest Peter Falk type of way. The story kept up a good level of intensity, though there was a reasonable amount of comic relief.

But I couldn't help feeling that there were missed opportunities here. The murderous doctor has a mentally challenged (presumably due to primitive brain surgery) assistant named Frieda. Frieda helps him dispose of bodies, cleans up the blood-drenched lab after he performs his dismemberments, and performs other helpful tasks. It would have made the whole thing much more interesting if, in the end, we had learned that she was his mother, and that he had performed the lobotomies. The fact that there was no such revelation disappointed me. I was also expecting that, as the police were closing in on the Doctor, Frieda would -- disgusted by the horrors she has seen -- would gather the resolve to turn on him. Again, that did not happen -- though this may have been a matter of the movie purposefully defying expectations. Finally, after all the thrills and violence, I found the very end to be a huge letdown. This could have done so much more.

 

Ratings

Me: 8.5

Bob-O: 7.1

Christina: 7.5

Dave: 9.5

Joe: 10 (actually, Joe missed this session, but I'm just assuming he would have given it a 10).