The first thing to realise as you are watching Jess Franco's version of the story of the notorious late Victorian serial killer is that it bears no resemblance at all to the facts of the story – yes, Franco's Ripper kills prostitutes in the London fog but the details of the murders and the process and outcome of the investigation are not a jot like the reality. Once you've accepted this, the film stops being frustratingly inaccurate and you can begin to appreciate it, or at least parts of it.
The film has at its centre the story of a Victorian doctor, played with surprising restraint by Klaus Kinski, who spends his days ministering to the poor and his nights raping and murdering prostitutes. A psychological explanation is offered for this murderousness – his own mother was a whore who taunted and sexually abused her son. Yet this psychological aspect of the film is a red herring – what seems really important is Franco's subversive suggestion that behind acts of charity and poor relief lie a consciousness which is murderous, misogynist and deranged – it could be that Kinski's Jack is the soul of Victorian society exposing itself in the dead of night.
The crimes are investigated by a Scotland Yard detective who is having problems with maintaining his relationship with a ballerina. This relationship is odd, in that its focus on the life/work balance and its suggestion that individual careers can get in the way of people's attempts at romantic partnership is entirely a 1970s concept – such an idea has no relevance to Victorian London. Yet the preponderance of mirrors in the scenes involving the two would suggest that this relationship is deliberately modern and reflecting contemporary (1970s) problems and values, and if this is modern then so is the problem of Jack. Franco's suggestion is that behind modern liberalism lays a dark and deadly, Oedipal, whoring and brutal secret. Combined with this, the film often concentrates on the economic realities of the characters' situations – Kinski's surgery makes no money, one of his unemployed patients blackmails him, a bar owner complains that he's made little money today. Jack's crimes form a backdrop, in fact the dark heart, of a society in thrall to Capital.
Some scenes in the film, which does plod at times, work better than others. There's a very funny collective interview with witnesses which satirises the technique of artist impressions – in its caricatured humour, it feels more like something from Morrissey's The Hound of the Baskervilles than a Franco sexploitation film; there's a saucy song from a music hall singer, a sequence daringly begun with a close-up of the woman's Basque-clad buttocks, the camera like Jack seeing a woman's body as mere parts (also sleazily suggesting a singing ass); best of all, there's a murder sequence in the grounds of a horticultural gardens, with Kinski's Jack – looking every inch the traditional Ripper – stalking through the fog and murdering his victim under a tree. He stabs her – we see the gash of a wound – then shockingly rapes her, a subliminal implication in our minds that he is using his newly made wound as his point of entry. The scene is sickening and extreme, and really does confront the viewer with the horror of a sexuality which delights in blood and death.
The film has at its centre the story of a Victorian doctor, played with surprising restraint by Klaus Kinski, who spends his days ministering to the poor and his nights raping and murdering prostitutes. A psychological explanation is offered for this murderousness – his own mother was a whore who taunted and sexually abused her son. Yet this psychological aspect of the film is a red herring – what seems really important is Franco's subversive suggestion that behind acts of charity and poor relief lie a consciousness which is murderous, misogynist and deranged – it could be that Kinski's Jack is the soul of Victorian society exposing itself in the dead of night.
The crimes are investigated by a Scotland Yard detective who is having problems with maintaining his relationship with a ballerina. This relationship is odd, in that its focus on the life/work balance and its suggestion that individual careers can get in the way of people's attempts at romantic partnership is entirely a 1970s concept – such an idea has no relevance to Victorian London. Yet the preponderance of mirrors in the scenes involving the two would suggest that this relationship is deliberately modern and reflecting contemporary (1970s) problems and values, and if this is modern then so is the problem of Jack. Franco's suggestion is that behind modern liberalism lays a dark and deadly, Oedipal, whoring and brutal secret. Combined with this, the film often concentrates on the economic realities of the characters' situations – Kinski's surgery makes no money, one of his unemployed patients blackmails him, a bar owner complains that he's made little money today. Jack's crimes form a backdrop, in fact the dark heart, of a society in thrall to Capital.
Some scenes in the film, which does plod at times, work better than others. There's a very funny collective interview with witnesses which satirises the technique of artist impressions – in its caricatured humour, it feels more like something from Morrissey's The Hound of the Baskervilles than a Franco sexploitation film; there's a saucy song from a music hall singer, a sequence daringly begun with a close-up of the woman's Basque-clad buttocks, the camera like Jack seeing a woman's body as mere parts (also sleazily suggesting a singing ass); best of all, there's a murder sequence in the grounds of a horticultural gardens, with Kinski's Jack – looking every inch the traditional Ripper – stalking through the fog and murdering his victim under a tree. He stabs her – we see the gash of a wound – then shockingly rapes her, a subliminal implication in our minds that he is using his newly made wound as his point of entry. The scene is sickening and extreme, and really does confront the viewer with the horror of a sexuality which delights in blood and death.