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.

I am an enthusiastic fan of the Hammer Studios, and my admiration for this brilliant Production Company gets greater with each film I see. The Hammer Studios are most famous for their films made in the late 50s and 60s, most prominently for the (awesome) "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" series. As far as I am considered, however, some of Hammer's films from the early 70s are just as brilliant as their older successes. One of their greatest and my personal favorite of their films, the brilliant "Vampire Circus" was made in 1972, for example, and the early 70s also brought a variety of other classics, such as "Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde" or "Scars Of Dracula", which is easily the nastiest entry to Hammer's Dracula series. "Hands Of The Ripper" of 1971 is yet another great Hammer production that is immensely atmospheric, genuinely creepy, well-acted and stunningly suspenseful, and an absolute must-see for every Horror-fan.

As a toddler, little Anna has to witness the murder of her mother by her own father - none other than the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper himself. At the age of seventeen, Anna (Angharad Rees) lives at the house of an elderly lady, a phony medium who is perfectly willing to leave her 'granddaughter' to rich 'gentlemen' for money. After this 'grandmother' is brutally murdered, the rich doctor John Pritchard (Eric Porter), a humanist and follower of Siegmund Freud, decides to take custody of poor Anna, both out of sympathy and for research reasons...

"Hands Of The Ripper" is a vastly underrated Hammer gem that is ingenious in many aspects. The film is immensely creepy and scary, with a suspense level that is higher than in most Hammer flicks, and the murders are brutal and very bloody. The atmosphere is eerie and tense and, as usual for Hammer, the film is shot in great Gothic locations. The performances are great. Eric Porter delivers an excellent performance as Dr. Pritchard, and Angharad Rees deserves special praise for her outstanding performance in the role of Anna. All said, this is a shamefully underrated film. Creepy, stylish, excellently acted and stunningly suspenseful from the beginning to the end "Hands Of The Ripper" is a great gem from Hammer that no lover of Horror can afford to miss!

Hands of The Ripper is a well made but slow-paced 1971 offering from Hammer. Some nice acting from Eric Porter and Angharad Rees offers some compensation for a rather lugubrious tale of Jack The Ripper's daughter, who, when subjected to sparkly flashes of light followed by a kiss (which happens about five times in the movie, straining credulity to breaking point) is psychically possessed by the spirit of her old Dad, dispatching all and sundry in variously nasty ways.

As a take on the Ripper story, this doesn't really work. As usual the prostitutes on display here are mainly glamour types with little attention to veracity (a few matronly ladies do make it into the mix) and Eric Porter's Freudian Doctor is surely the most misguided psychoanalyst ever put on screen, even disposing of the bodies when Anna kills.

Horror movies were soon to descend to body count status and this is a kind of prototype. We get Dora Bryan impaled on a poker, Marji Lawerence's throat gorily slashed and Lynda Byron with hat pins stuck in her eye. Squelch! The main trouble with Hammer at this point is that they were making too many horror films - haven't counted exactly but about 12 in 1970/71 alone. They flooded the market and diminished audience interest. Still, on it's own Hands of The Ripper is not a bad little film. Earnest and rather glum, with an effective ending set in St Paul's Whispering Gallery.

I'm a big fan of Hammer Horror; their inventive camp styling puts their output above the majority of other horror studios. Adding to that is the fact that when you watch a Hammer film, you know that you're in for a good time. While Hands of the Ripper isn't the best film to come out of the studio, it still represents another success for the studio and it's a film that will no doubt delight their fans. The great plot line follows the daughter of the infamous murderer; Jack the Ripper. After witnessing her father kill her mother, the young girl is permanently scarred and now, years later, her past is beginning to surface. The film finds a space between a psychological thriller and the familiar 'slasher' sub-genre (and it's yet another film in this style that pre-dates Halloween), and it blends brilliantly. The first thing you will notice about this movie is the way that the murders are done - stylishly, brutally and extremely camp! They're extremely over the top and a great treat for the horror fanatic.

Eric Porter stars as a psychiatrist who takes our heroine in after she murdered the woman who was looking after. Porter gives a fine performance as the good doctor, and keeps in with the style of the older leading male that Hammer have created. The film is noteworthy for it's excellent creation of the period in which the film is set, and that too adds to the delight of the film. One thing that I have noticed about Hammer's product as they entered the seventies is that the films lost that colourful camp edge that epitomised the earlier films and it had been replaced by a more European style. Captain Kronos is the prime example of that change, but luckily Hands of the Ripper is more like the Hammer films of yore. Not as colourful, but it still has that Hammer charm that us fans love so much. As usual, the film isn't quite perfect; it's dogged by a less than perfect script, and at times the psychological elements of the film ground down to walking pace, which makes the film boring; but generally this is a lovely piece of kitsch and Hammer fans won't be disappointed!

'Hands Of The Ripper' is one of the most interesting Hammer movies. An odd mixture of Edwardian costume drama, pop psychology and proto-slasher gore, which may not be 100% successful, but it does make for some fascinating viewing. Eric Porter (who some may remember from the 60s TV series 'The Forsyte Saga') is perfectly cast as the detached and driven Dr John Pritchard who unexpectedly encounters Jack The Ripper's daughter Anna (the lovely Angharad Rees). She has no idea of her background and is working for a fraudulent medium that Pritchard and his son visit. After Anna is implicated in a brutal and bloody murder he "adopts" her, and hopes to unlock her secrets using the new fangled theories of one Sigmund Freud. Can he help this confused and potentially lethal young woman before she kills again? I leave it up to you to find out. While I don't rate this one quite as highly as many, I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it is yet another example of just how most of Hammer's output has been largely underrated over the years.