Hands of the Ripper

The ratings here is a bit high for this movie, it's watchable but not much to get excited about. The first scene of the movie is best. Daughter of Jack the Ripper sees him kill her mother, and is of course scarred for life. As adult in this movie, she gets into a trance at certain times thinking about her father and kills people. That's about it. Doctor takes her in thinking he can cure her. What is really stupid (and ruins what is already not a very intriguing movie) is the doctor, knowing she kills without thought and seeing the results of her killing (sharp things stuck in people's faces and bodies), leaves her untied and basically unattended in his office, and he happens to have a sword easily accessible (how convenient). So what happens? While distracted she take sword, stabs him, and he later dies. Tied her down or perhaps her arms? Remove all sharp objects? Not in this movie. There are not twists or other plot devices to make this more exciting than I described.

Hands of the Ripper(480P)

source: Hands of the Ripper

Not your typical Hammer vehicle starring Eric Porter as a doctor, influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, who wants to study a young 17 year-old girl he knows to be a murderer. Porter thinks by analyzing her past he can find out why people murder and maybe prevent the act of murder in the human race in the process. The film is interesting in its objectives yet is a bit uneven in its execution. Directed by Peter Sasdy, who has obvious talent and directed Taste the Blood of Dracula nd Countess Dracula, the film works very hard at focussing on the relationship of childhood memories with adult behaviour, but at the same time wants to incorporate typical Hammer stuff such as big bosoms busting through stretched corsets and lots of blood and bizarre deaths. Angharad Rees plays the murderous daughter of the Whitechapel killer who as a child saw her mother brutally killed and then was orphaned. She does a good job as do all the actors. My biggest problem is with Porter, not his performance, but his character's motivation. I find it a little difficult to believe that a man supposedly intelligent would be so amoral, for he definitely seems to think that he is doing nothing wrong. The film is not all talk. There are several murders, all fairly brutal in their execution(no pun intended). The most ridiculous of these has to be a woman killed by her pince-nez glasses...but I'll let you decide if murder by pince-nez is realistic or not. There are some wonderful scenes too and the climatic one in St. Pauls is extremely powerful.

source: Hands of the Ripper

Quite a classy little feature, this one. It's not perfect, and I'll discuss its flaws readily, but it has a lot going for it. I'll get one thing out of the way immediately - "Hands of the Ripper" is blighted by a dodgy title that makes it sound like a second-rate slasher flick when it's actually a rather good and sometimes moving little film about a doctor, played superbly by Eric Porter (who I'm sure I've seen in a film before, but he's alas not in any other film I currently own), who takes it upon himself to try and find the cause of why a young girl should want to kill other people, seemingly against her own will. I'm also not sure about the hamfisted way that Jack the ripper gets shoehorned into this in what I can only imagine was a way to generate more interest about the film in advertising at the time - the basic premise is that the young daughter of Jack sees him do in her mother, and is so emotionally traumatised that later in life she occasionally goes into a trance and kills people herself (none of this is a spoiler by the way, it's all in the first two minutes). This would have worked far better if it had been the daughter of an anonymous killer, as one immediately finds oneself trying to swallow the idea of Jack the Ripper having a daughter; "Like father, like daughter," perhaps. It's just a bit silly. The said opening scenes would also be far more emotional and affecting if we didn't have the credits playing over them. Sigh. The first few murders of the film are rather unconvincing as well, which some judicious editing would have compromised for (as those seen later in the film show, less is infinitely more), and Dora Bryan, playing the most unconvincing medium I've ever seen in a film, meets a grizzly fate in the first 10 minutes that reminded me of the unicorn scene from "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" (there's a reference that'll fly over your heads, I'm sure), just with less humour. In fact, the whole film is terribly serious, with little camp at all, and is all the better for it. In fact, when the only things I can criticise about a film are a few seconds of dodgy editing and some namedropping, then all is well. The cast are all fantastic (and spot Lynda Baron making an appearance as a prostitute later on - an image I'm sure none of us wanted), and there's a wonderfully haunting musical score to boot. It's a very lavish and well made film, with some fantastic Victorian sets. And there's a few genuinely surprising twists that do actually seem to arise naturally out of the plot. Even the murderer herself gains viewer sympathy, and that's quite hard to achieve. It's all rather down-beat admittedly, and certainly won't leave you in the happiest of moods, but it's an extremely good feature that shows what Hammer could do when it was actually trying. "Hands of the Ripper": rubbish title, great film. Oh yes.

POSSIBLE SPOILERS A young girl called Anna (Angharad Rees) turns out to be the daughter of the infamous Whitechapel murderer Jack The Ripper and even more sinister she is possessed by his evil spirit! Excellent late offering from Hammer with good direction by Peter Sasdy who made his successful feature-film debut with the company's TASTE THE BLOOD OF Dracula (1970). The lighting of Ken Talbot is exemplary as is the art direction of Roy Stannard. HANDS OF THE RIPPER is one of Hammer's goriest films and the shock sequences are handled with skill and economy and achieve their object - to horrify! Good performances too especially from Rees as the possessed Anna, Eric Porter as Dr Pritchard, the medical man who tries to cure her and Dora Bryan is amusing in a cameo as a phony medium. All these virtues succeed admirably in papering over the indifferent development of the plot.

Strained and humorless (especially in light of its rather dubious psychology), but well-paced and comfortably lurid, this genteel body count movie highlights the unusually hypnotic presence of Angharad Rees as a young woman periodically possessed by Jack the Ripper, thus allowing for some nasty gore effects amidst the Edwardian propriety. It's all pretty standard stuff for Hammer, but is handled with a good deal of visual elan, even if the central relationship, between psychoanalyst Porter and Rees, drives the narrative without ever being satisfactorily explained.

Anna sees her father (Jack the Ripper) stab her mother to death when she's a little girl. Twenty years later she's been adopted and knows nothing about her past--but she kills people when she flashes back to seeing her mother killed. Dr. John Pritchard (Eric Porter) knows she does this but wants to try to find out why and cure her while the bodies pile up. Interesting Hammer horror that mixes psychology with extreme violence. I originally caught this on network TV ages ago where all the violence was cut out. There's not a lot of it but what there is is VERY strong and incredibly gruesome. Even the R rated version released here in the US is edited! I finally saw it uncut on a Portuguese DVD. The color is a little faded and the end credits stop abruptly but it's letter-boxed and complete. The story is a little slowly paced but I was never bored and the violence shocked me--and I'm a hardened horror movie fan! The acting was excellent by Porter and Angharad Rees (playing the unfortunate Anna). The psychology is a little bit silly but the movie is strong and well-done. If you can see this uncut I recommend it.

This is one of four Peter Sasdy films shown on local TV in the early 1980s when we still owned a black-and-white set and I was too young to be allowed to see them! Over the years, I managed to catch up with three of them: the film under review itself while in London in September 2002, TASTE THE BLOOD OF Dracula (1970) fairly recently on DivX and NOTHING BUT THE NIGHT (1972) just last week on DVD-R; the only one still eluding me is, reportedly, also the weakest of the bunch, I DON'T WANT TO BE BORN aka MONSTER (1975) This is arguably Sasdy's best work for Hammer and I guess overall, too; similarly, Eric Porter's excellent performance is very underrated and among the best given in the studio's entire output. The film contains two very well-directed sequences: the slow build-up to the revelation of the first murder and the very last scene featuring the fatal leap off the balcony at the Whispering Corridors. The sleazy MP character (Derek Godfrey) and the opportunistic protector/medium (Dora Bryan) are two other well-rounded characterizations; on the other hand, those of Porter's son and blind fiancée (a wasted Jane Merrow) are bland and one-dimensional. In spite of its importance in establishing the girl's true identity, the doctor's second visit to a medium could perhaps have been altered to a different profession so that it does not seem reminiscent of the opening séance. Curiously enough, Hammer visited similar Jack The Ripper territory that same year in Roy Ward Baker's DR. JEKYLL AND SISTER HYDE; besides, while the murder of the proverbial kind-hearted * is again well-staged, the generally clichéd portrayal of them borders on caricature. The Network SE DVD features an Audio Commentary (which I've yet to listen to) and an episode of the 1970s THRILLER TV series featuring HANDS OF THE RIPPER's co-star Angharad Rees whose good and innocent looks are effectively deployed in the blank stare of the entranced protagonist.