Best movie of this year hands down!

A Major Disappointment

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Ripper, The (1985) * 1/2 (out of 4) This here was one of the first movies to be produced in order to go straight to video with the director's Blood Cult being considered the very first. The film tells the story of a professor (Tom Schreier) who buys the ring of Jack the Ripper and soon afterwards women start turning up with their throats slashed and guts ripped out. This was a very popular and rather infamous rental back in the day but it's pretty much been forgotten since then. I hadn't seen the film in nearly twenty-years and my memories of it were pretty bad but this viewing really didn't come off as bad as I thought it would. There's no question that the film is bad but I was rather shocked to see how well it actually is considering there really wasn't anything for the director to work off of. In other words, I've seen countless direct to VHS (or now DVD) titles that were cheap and poor but it's rather neat seeing such an early example and notice that it's better than a lot of what followed. The biggest problem is that the film runs 104-minutes, which is at least twenty-minutes too long. The actual story is an interesting one and one that could work but not at the long running time. Another problem is that the film spends way too much time with one of the professor's students and his girlfriend. Both of the actors are very bad so why so much time was spent with them is beyond me. Gore master Tom Savini gets top billing but he only appears in one scene playing the spirit of Jack the Ripper.

THE RIPPER (1985) Director Christopher Lewis. Wade Tower, Mona Van Pernis, Tom Savini.College professor is posessed by the evil within Jack the Ripper's Ring that he purchases at a pawn shop. Hence, a brutal spree of Jack the Ripper style murders spread all over town whenever he has a dream!Well written, and well told story, delivers the goods as far as gore goes. But the acting is way too cheeseball, making it look like an infomercial, or better yet, a public access version of Jack the Ripper. It was nice to have Tom save the day during the last ten minutes.Filmed in Tulsa Oklahoma, shot on Super VHS, and released direct to video. ** (out of 4*'s)

OK, I like some of Tom Savini's work, but this was by far, one of his worst. First of all, you can tell that this was a shot-on-video film because of the cheesy camerawork. And second, the gory special effects almost made my throw up. Well, OK, I was 10 at the time but I was seeing with my parents and I was a huge horror fan at the time. But this was one of the worst!!! Avoid it all costs!!!!

A college professor stumbles across a ring that belongs to Jack the Ripper and goes on a murderous rampage. This gory garbage plays like a cheap early 80s music video. How did special effects genius Tom Savini end up in this loser? Avoid this crap at all costs. My evaluation: (no stars).