Though slightly sleepy and hollow at times, "From Hell" is a slice of movie heaven

Rating: 8/10 (12 November 2001)

You may have noticed that I've played the comparison game a lot in 2001.
While it's had its benefits, it's also resulted in my watching of failures such as "Final Fantasy" and "Shrek" (yes, I considered "Shrek" a disappointment), in order to compare them to the likes of the far superior "Tomb Raider" (which I wanted to compare to 1995's "Mortal Kombat") and "Chicken Run," respectively.
It may sound unfair, but at the same time it's led me to watch movies that I originally wouldn't have plunked the money down for in the first place.
"From Hell" is no exception. I first heard of it after reading an article i n a British film magazine, of all places. The plot, characters and setting quickly had me believing that this was going to be "Sleepy Hollow Redux," which is never a bad thing.
As with the aforementioned 1999 Tim Burton masterpiece, Johnny Depp plays a Brit-accented police detective who tries to solve a series of grisly murders. Whereas "Sleepy Hollow" retells the legend of the Headless Horseman, "From Hell," directed by the Hughes Brothers, does likewise with the legend of Jack The Ripper, who, unfortunately, was never apprehended for his crimes.
However, that's where the similarities end.
While "From Hell" is by no means a letdown, I found that "Tomb Raider" had more in common with "Sleepy Hollow" than this did, but that's another story. It doesn't mean, though, that it's not entertaining. And yes, it has an engaging plot, though I had to see the film twice to fully get the gist of it.
As always, the ever-versatile Depp steals the show. He stars as Fred Abberline, a drug-addicted inspector who sees visions of brutally murdered women in his narcotic-hazed dreams that ultimately come true. One thing leads to another and he is soon saddled with a serial murder case in which a group of gravely down-and-out prostitutes inhabiting London's sleazy, unpleasant Whitechapel District circa 1888 are being murdered one by one by a killer who is bedecked in a top hat and billowing cape and whom the public has nicknamed Jack The Ripper. He then takes his madness a step further and removes his victims' organs postmortem.
To put it bluntly, this ain't Mary Poppins, folks. There are no homogenized visions of merry old England to be found here.
Heather Graham plays alongside Depp as Mary Kelly, one of the circle of dirt-poor hookers who, while not being slaughtered, are constantly harassed and hounded by a seedy gang  call them Victorian-age pimps, if you will  for whatever small change they can scrounge up.
The killer's "surgeries" cause Abberline to seek help from Dr. William Gull (Ian Holm), who just happens to be the physician to the royal family (and who has developed a skin-crawling medical treatment known as a `prefrontal lobotomy'). Their partnership ultimately reveals an exciting twist in the plot.
Ian Richardson is effective as Abberline's pompous, anti-Semitic superior (he immediately believes a Jew is responsible for the killings), as is Robbie Coltrane as the inspector's sidekick, confidante and sounding board.
I'm always in the mood for a good murder mystery film, and "From Hell" fits the bill nicely. I liked how little clues were peppered around the crime scenes, ranging from how the hookers' throats were slashed ("The cut goes from left to right; the killer is right handed," Dr. Gull surmises early on), to Abberline finding an empty sprig of grapes and detecting the scent of a potent alcoholic drink laced with laudanum on the victims' breaths.
Plot and acting aside, the real standout of the film is Martin Childs' production design. The backgrounds and sets are so believable that one would never guess that the film was entirely shot in the Czech Republic, which it indeed was. The cinematography by Peter Deming brings viewers up close and personal to the action; it's almost as if you're part of the movie yourself as the characters stroll through Buckingham Palace or a dark alley. The exterior master shots of London are so beautiful that they look more like paintings borrowed from an art gallery.
There are no real negatives about this film; my only gripes were that the scenes involving Dr. Gull's medical procedures and John Merrick (the Elephant Man) served only to shock the audience and did little to advance the plot, and it also seemed rather odd that Jack The Ripper would have a partner in crime (a nervous, bottle-swigging carriage driver played by Jason Flemyng), which, as a result, doesn't make him as imposing as he should have been. The flow of the movie is distracted in the third act when another woman, passed off as a French friend of one of the prostitutes, is suddenly thrown into the pot from out of nowhere for no known reason other than to apparently add to the body count.
Yes, the term has become cliché, but "From Hell" is definitely not for the faint of heart. While the blood and gore is censored to some extent in the first act, more full-bleed (no pun intended) shots of the carnage are seen as the film progresses, and everything goes whole hog in the ending.
What attracted the brothers Hughes to this film was the opportunity to make a period movie about street violence (a genre that hasn't been beaten to death enough already), which is a thin motive in itself. While it's not groundbreaking for the genre by any means - it lacks what made "Sleepy Hollow" and "Seven" so spellbinding  it holds its own, though my mother noted that it was like watching "Murder By Decree" all over again.
All comparisons aside, "From Hell" is a nice, if sometimes grisly, little piece of cinematic heaven. 8/10