Pretty good story, but it's a bad movie

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 2004)

I understand that the Jack the Ripper story involves prostitutes. So there's going to have to be sexual references. But any movie can convey the idea of prostitution without showing what goes on during prostitution. All we need to see is the woman hitting on the guy, and her taking him off to some place alone. We don't need to see a woman giving a guy a hand job and him banging her into a fence. We don't need to see what goes on in the bedroom. We don't need to see sickly "girl-kissing-girl" crap. The idea of prostitution can be conveyed much more subtlety, which in my opinion would be more effective in this film since it's not a film about prostitution. It's a film about Jack the Ripper who kills prostitutes. Showing so many sexual obscenities didn't help the film. It just made it disgusting to watch.
I did like the actual story when it actually got around to telling it about a half hour or so into it (after the first half hour being basically a tame porno flick). I like how they involved the Freemasons, and how we eventually came to understand who Jack the Ripper was and why he was the way he was. Johnny Deep and Heather Graham were good in this film. The story had a decent mystery to it that at least kept me watching until the end to see the mystery solved...
...but the film was just too hard to watch with all the obscenity in it, and I don't think I'll ever watch it again. It's too bad, because it really had the potential of being a great film had it not been directed by a couple of perverts.