Ripping his way into the pages of history

Rating: 7/10 (25 July 2009)

(There are Spoilers)The film "From Hell" is not as far out as you may have at first thought in who the infamous "Jack the Ripper" really was. As Scotland Yard Inspector Fredrick Abberline, Johnny Depp, at first suspected the "Ripper" was not just your garden verity psycho killer but a man highly educated in both medicine and the human anatomy: A highly trained and respected doctor surgeon! It's this theory alone that's to eventually lead Inspector Abberline straight to the very base of power of the mighty 19th Century British Empire! Queen Victoria's, Liz Moscrop, Buckingham Palace!
High on opium, that was legal at the time, Inspector Abberline could sense things as a police detective that his fellow members of Scotland Yard couldn't. It was that extrasensory perception on Abberline's part that had him see the real reasons for the notorious "Ripper" murders. It was also his addiction to opium that in the end did Abberline in before he could brake the "Ripper" case wide open.
Classic Gothic Horror movie that takes a number of real historical as well as mysterious incidents, the "Jack the Ripper murders", and makes some sense of them. We do get to see,like Inspector Abberline, the real clues to the "Ripper" identity and, which are far more important, who he was actually working for. The "Ripper", in what the movie brought out, was not an ordinary killer emigrant and illiterate, in the English language, Jew from Czarist Russia or even an escaped lunatic from a mental institution. He was a very highly educated man who did his ghastly job of murder and dismemberment with a skill that would have taken years of practice at a major big city medical facility to achieve!
Starting out with a blood-red sunset over the city of London's-circa 1888-crime ridden Whitechapel and Kensington Districts the film "From Hell" accurately chronicles the murderous "Jack the Ripper" rampage that terrorized London that fateful late summer and fall of 1888. We get to see how the "Ripper's" murder of local prostitutes was not an act of murderous insanity but a well thought out plan, by those who controlled him, to rid any evidence connecting his victims, or one of them, to the British Royal Family.
***SPOILERS*** In the end it was Inspector Abberline's bulldog-like determination that turned his superior at Scotland Yard Sir. Charles Warner, Ian Richardson, against him. Not that Abberline wasn't doing his job but, in exposing the reasons for the "Ripper" killing, doing it far too well then he, and the power behind the British Throne, would have liked him to! Even though Mary Kelly, Heather Graham, is shown at the end of the film to have survived "Jack the Ripper's" reign of terror she in fact was, as we saw earlier, the "Ripper's" last and most shockingly dismembered murder victim! I couldn't figure out what the movie was trying to tell us in showing Mary back and alive and well in her native Ireland unless it was her soul not body who we were supposed to be seeing?