Entertaining rubbish, in itself like a Victorian penny dreadful.

Rating: 5/10 (26 June 2005)

This piece is immensely silly but quite entertaining, often in spite of itself, on account of being unintentionally hilarious from the start.
I watched it on TV and the jump from the presenter's dire warning of "Contains strong language from the very start" to the stereotype Cockney's declaring "bloody" this and "bleedin" that was hysterical! The depiction of Whitechapel low-life reminded me of my all time favourite Jack The Ripper movie, made as part of a "Mad" compendium, in which the murderer is exposed as being none other than...the Loch Ness Monster!
Some years ago, before the film was finished, I interviewed and photographed at a comic convention the publisher of the original graphic novel. He was adamant that this was going to be definitively the true story of Jack The Ripper! No fantasy licence about it! Seen in the context of his earnest claims the end product seems every bit as daft as the conjecture that it was Nessie wot did it. For although the story is woven in and around some of the facts of the case, it is really a complete flight of fantasy. And utterly fantastical at that.
For a start, even in modern Britain, anyone not "well spoken", let alone someone who yardles on like Depp does here could never rise to the rank of inspector in the Metropolitan Police. Let alone in the Nineteenth Century. The unreality of his "Mockney" speakin' jack-the-lad druggie cop is fundamentally not of this world. The same is true of the idea that people of the period commonly sat at home listening to gramophone recording's as do a couple of the characters here. The disc gramophone had only been invented the year before! More unreal even than that is that in one scene the gramophone is playing music from the score of the movie! And what, in the end, if anything, did John Merrick have to do with all this? Were we were supposed to think, yep, it's the Elephant Man wot did it ).
These matters aside, Ian Holm turns in a superbly entertaining performance that knocks the tired Hollywood slasher-stereotype into a cocked hat. Although one cannot help in passing momentarily seeing him as a kind of psycho-Bilbo. However, unlike the tedious likes of Freddy Kruger and Jason Voorhees, Holm's monster is genuinely chilling, because he is totally believable. The scenes in which we are shown his tenuous grasp on reality, the paranoiac visions and time-slips unravelling in his head, are definitely the best thing here. Although the black contact lenses are another detail hard to reconcile with reality. Even more so the weird gloaming from the windows which the cabman spies, suggesting that Jack's murdering plan in objectively does release an awesome ethereal power! It's as though the two directors could not agree as to whether it should be "all in the mind" or a real force of black magic.
The same dichotomy is found in the closing scenes. However,the depiction of Kelly's happy ending with the often mentioned but not previously seen "Baby Alice" is possessed of an idealised unreality that strikes an effective note of ambiguity. Does it work out well or is it only in the drug-addled mind of the wishful dreamer on his deathbed.