Ripper

Plot synopsis:
Molly Keller (A. J. Cook) narrowly avoids being murdered by a serial killer, after managing to escape an island. Five years later, she takes a forensic psychology class taught by Marshall Kane (Bruce Payne), a world-renowned expert on deviant violent offenders. Also taking the class are Jason Korda (Ryan Northcott), Chantal Etienne (Claire Keim), Marisa Tavares (Kelly Brook), Eddie Sackman (Derek Hamilton), Mary-Anne Nordstrom (Daniella Evangelista), Andrea Carter (Emmanuelle Vaugier) and Aaron Kroeker (Courtney J. Stevens). During one lesson, Marshall pranks his class by pretending to murder one of the students, his intention being to demonstrate the potential of anyone to be a killer. The unorthodox lesson prompts Aaron to reveal to Molly that he is aware of her past, which angers her as she does not want to discuss the trauma she endured. Her mood is further upset by Eddie when he attempts to hit on her, only to be firmly rejected.
Later that night, the group, excluding Aaron, meet up for a study session, which soon degenerates into an argument over Molly's overtly hostile attitude. To ease the mounting tension, they decide to go to a party taking place in a nearby abandoned building. Here, Jason makes a genuine attempt to get to know Molly better, but she remains distant. Marisa, meanwhile, has sex with a masked man, after which she overhears Chantal and Andrea talking about her. Feeling hurt, Marisa decides to leave, but the elevator instead takes her up to an isolated floor of the building. Upon stepping out of the elevator, Marisa is attacked and viciously stabbed by a masked assailant. In her panic, she stumbles and falls out of a window, but a chain wrapped around her ankle catches her, enabling the killer to hoist her back up, where he brutally and graphically stabs her to death, before sending her body crashing through a window into the party below.
The next day, the group mourn Marisa's death, while deciding they will try and identify who the killer is. Molly meets Detective Kelso (Jürgen Prochnow), who was part of the investigation of the previous murders. The pair go to the murder scene where Detective Kelso warns Molly that he believes the killer is back. Mary-Anne is driving home to see her family when a black truck begins to ram into the back of her car. She attempts to drive away, but the truck pushes her to the side of a cliff. As she attempts to get out, the truck hits her car again, causing her to crash through the windshield and plummet to her death. Detective Kelso finds her body in a nearby shed, where the killer has stabbed her repeatedly.
Molly challenges Marshall, and shows the killer is following the pattern of the famous serial killer Jack the Ripper. Jason manages to persuade the group to continue investigating despite their doubt. Molly and Jason discover a murderer previously held Marshall hostage. Chantal kisses Jason, but soon apologises to Molly for doing so, and the pair make friends. While Andrea is at the morgue identifying Mary-Anne's wounds, she is pursued by the killer, who drugs her before gutting her.
Jason, Chantal, and Eddie find out about Molly's past, which causes an argument resulting in Molly removing herself from the group. An upset Molly is comforted by Marshall. The following night, Molly, Jason, Eddie, Chantal, and Marshall are taken to a cabin where they realize the victims share the same initials of the victims of Jack the Ripper. Suspicion falls on Aaron, who was the one that assembled the study group. They attempt to phone Detective Kelso, but the phone is not working. After Molly and Chantal fall out, Eddie, Jason, and Chantal leave to try and fix the phone satellite on top of the mountain. Their car soon breaks down, forcing Jason to proceed on foot. Eddie attempts to fix the car, while Chantal remains inside. The killer soon appears and knocks out Chantal before Eddie's hand is trapped inside the bonnet of the car. Chantal wakes up and panics, driving the car forward into a tree which crushes Eddie's back, killing him. The killer chases Chantal to a factory, where she accidentally activates a log splitting machine. She bumps into Aaron, who warns her he knows who the killer is. She tries to escape, but they fall into the machine, where they are both mutilated by the circular saws.
Back at the cabin, Molly becomes suspicious of both Jason and Marshall. As Jason arrives back, Molly knocks him out before running into the forest. She encounters Jason again and flees while the killer hacks him to death with an axe. Molly discovers Marshall standing over a murdered Jason, before Detective Kelso arrives and knocks out Marshall. Molly then hallucinates and sees her younger self in the forest, gesturing to the two men and suggesting that Molly is the one who killed them all. Later, Marshall is executed for the murders, and due to visible mental problems, Molly is put in an insane asylum.
It has been said that the killer was never definitively named in the film, and there is suggestion that Detective Kelso is actually the killer. During the opening murder scene, as the young Molly escapes on a boat, she stabs the killer in the hand while he attempts to climb onto the boat after her. Detective Kelso is seen in every scene in the movie to be wearing only one glove on the same hand that the killer was stabbed in. However, in the film's sequel it was revealed that Molly was indeed the killer.

Tags: murder

Review:
Straight on the heels of above average (or well above average) direct-to-video horror movie such as, Cube, Ginger Snaps, Cut, and The Truth About Demons, comes the latest DTV installment, Ripper: Letter From Hell.
When the people around her begin to die, she believes a new serial killer is hunting them down, imitating the slayings of Jack the Ripper.
The killings in Ripper: Letter From Hell, are much more extensive than the average slasher film.
Horror fans are used to seeing the killer show up, swing his weapon of choice, and then the scene is cut, going back to the more boring part of the movie.
In Ripper, the killer spends more time with his victims, making them scream in agony, stabbing them to death, and then heaving them through a window, or ramming them off a cliff and leaving them to hang onto a rock before finishing them off.
The beginning comes off as a Brothers Grim-like fairy tale with the serial killer's pursuit of Molly through a dark, rainy, forest.
Ripper: Letter From Hell is a stylish, well orchestrated effort and deserves a spot with the recent array of worthy direct-to-video horror movies..
When her fellow classmates start dying at the hands of a mystery killer, who is following the modus operandi of the infamous Jack the Ripper, she suspects that the murderer from her past is back to finish the job.Molly and the remaining students from her study group pool their profiling talents in an attempt to discover the identity of the maniac.Director John Eyres directs this slab of stalk 'n slash with both eyes firmly fixed on the teen market, and what may have been a nice addition to the genre becomes an annoying and unwatchable piece of garbage due to its MTV trappings.
The nastiest deaths actually occur by accident, when two characters fall in front of the whirring buzz blades of a sawmill.Toward the end of this drivel, which at 115 minutes is way too long, I gave up following the ludicrous plot.
There was some rubbish about the victims sharing the same initials as those killed by Jack the Ripper, a pointless (non-explicit) sex scene, and various characters were revealed as red herrings.
Terrible dialog, annoying characters, and a pretty lame comparison to Jack the Ripper destroy this film.
Unfortunately, the movie hits rock bottom whenever the characters try to explain something (which I again attribute to bland characters and dialog).Also, there are no real ties to Jack the Ripper.
A connection to the Ripper seems to be thrown in for good measure.To sum it up: If you have seen any slasher films over the past five years, you have already seen this movie..
One would expect more from a movie which promises serial psycho killers copying Jack the Ripper.
A.J Cook as Molly is both a great anti-heroine and a wonderful surprise as an actress, and STV veteran Bruce Payne hands in a brilliant turn as the teens' ex-FBI teacher, with a British accent that puts Angelina Jolie et al to shame.
Add to this a twisty turny plot that had me in shock by the time it was finished (seriously, I've seen all the big horror-thrillers and I still didn't see the end coming) and Ripper is exactly what STV is for, showing up the big boys.So, if you think you can hack a movie with some rough edges, and you like a good slasher whodunnit, check this out..
As most people who comment negatively on DTV slasher films have only ever seen the Scream trilogy and I Know What You Did Last Summer, they can't be expected to construct a comparative view of what is really a film that excels the others of its ilk on production values alone.Although surface gloss is by no means compensation for a good strong story, Ripper has a whole lot more plot than some its commercially released contemporaries without abandoning the simplicity of the slasher conventions: a group of student taking a course in serial killer profiling are offed by a mystery murderer who bases the slayings on the most famous serial killer of them all - Jack the Ripper.Storywise, this is really a combo of Copycat and Urban Legend but, for the most part, succeeds in creating an ongoing ambiguity over the killers identity (something that is never honestly made clear at the end), but the ingenuity lies in the styling leading up to the finale.
The unsympathetic teenagers are first excited at the chance to do some detective work of their own, then they're curious as it becomes obvious they're somewhere on his list before fighting amongst themselves and ending up hacked to pieces.I wouldn't give any of the twists away, but Ripper is a largely satisfactory venture with a level of stylish (though sometimes misogynistic) violence that has been absent in recent horror outings and echoes the early days of Friday the 13th with a bit more visual flair.
Typical (and therefore dull) slasher type story about a group of students taking a course about serial killers who suddenly find that they're being bumped off one by one in a style reminiscent of Jack the Ripper.
One of the students - Molly (A.J. Cook) has been subject to this before, being the only survivor of a serial killer on an island five years before.
There's lots of wonderful screaming, and all sorts of suspects, from the appropriately creepy professor to the nerdy social outcast student, and by the end you don't really care who did it; you just want them to finish the job and put this cast out of its misery.Best line though?
I rented this movie thinking that with a title like "Ripper: Letters from Hell" that it might have something - anything, to do with Jack the Ripper.
This movie starts off with a young girl surviving a serial killer's attacks, than jumps forward several years to her as a college student studying other serial killers and obsessed with all things Gothic (the girl is obnoxious, so you have no interest in her or anything she's doing here) Then, about 45 minutes into the movie, someone mercifully starts killing off the various assortment of college low life, and the characters seem to think that the killings are reminiscent of Jack the Ripper's killings over a century earlier.
They figured that if they just automatically set it up for a sequel they could get away with the movie not making any sense, and the gaping holes in the plot, and whoever does a sequel will either have to explain that themselves, or it won't be mentioned at all, and either way the makers of this movie would be off the hook for any resolution to this story.Indeed, there are more violent and gory movies than this, there are movies with pointless endings like this, but this one somehow manages to beat all of them and take the cake for some reason.
Considering their subsequent large body of work, the 4th grade level acting can likely be blamed on the truly horrid dialogue they are forced to attempt to make sound decent.I would tell you to just fast-forward to the kill-scenes, but most of them are not worth the effort (was that apple-red paint used for blood?) Once the music video of the girl running through the city hit the screen, I couldn't take it any more, but forced myself to endure this drivel just to verify the "twist" ending that I had predicted within the first 5 minutes.
Rubbish.Oh, and although I'm no expert on the history of serial killers, I think I can safely say that Jack the Ripper never ran any of his victims over in a jeep..
I can't think of a single good thing to say about it, except that watching Jurgen Prochnow prowling and slithering around, dressed all in black, whispering half his lines and over-emphasising the other half gave me the best laugh I've had for a long time.
At first I thought this was because my brain had atrophied during the course of watching the movie, but when I listened to the Director's commentary on the DVD I discovered that he'd 'deliberately left the film open-ended so that we could all make up our own minds'.
Shamelessly borrowing elements of  recent horror movie hits such as "Scream" "Copycat" and "I Know what you did last Summer", the film drags on interminably for nearly 2 hours with an assortment of laughable plot details, uphorent acting, a contrived soundtrack matched by the god-awful dialogue ( for example : "Shut up!" - "No, You Shut up!" ), the silliest love scene and a swag of horror movie cliches that even a spoof film wouldn't dare use due to familiarity.
This film was better than expected and enough of the characters were developed to the point that it was very difficult to guess just who might be the killer.
Here's a list of things Ripper gets wrong:1) It's a post-Scream slasher 2) It's full of terrible music and horrible quick-cut editing 3) It's one hour and forty-five minutes long (A slasher film!) 4) With the exception of Bruce Payne and Jurgen Protchnow, the acting is terribleAnd if you think I'm going to say 'in spite of this, I liked it' then you're wrong.
It was crap!After a promising pre-credits sequence where a girl named Molly survives a serial killer's rampage, we're thrown right into smart arse territory as we see our victims are all part of a college class who are studying murderers, or something.
We get a lot of babble about serial killers (looks at watch), characters establishing themselves (nods off), and a fake killing instigated by the teacher (pffft).
To cut a very long story short (there are only two killings in the first hour!), one of the students (or maybe the teacher) is killing everyone else in the way Jack the Ripper killed his victims.
Also, the 'killing Jack the Ripper style' plot is plainly dropped after the first two kills (unless Jack the Ripper used a bandsaw and a hatchet), plus the ending is completely daft and annoying.It is well made enough, but the post-Scream era wasn't a great time for slasher films.
Ripper was released at the height of popular slasher movies such as Scream, Halloween, and Friday the 13th.
It's no surprise that Ripper made a quiet entry via direct to video because I had not heard of this movie until I saw this on the New Release shelf.
A sole survivor of a massacre (A.J. Cook, Final Destination 2) studies serial killers under a famous Forensic Science expert (Bruce Payne, Passenger 57), but her classmates soon start dying at the hands of a serial killer who is replicating the infamous killer Jack the Ripper.
Assuming that you are not familiar with the murders committed by Jack the Ripper you could easily put some other famous serial killer in his place.
I was really questioning myself whether or not to rent this movie when i went to Blockbuster, bu then i remembered some good reviews on it, and i used to be OBSESSED with Jack The Ripper, so i said "What the Hell" and took it out.
By the end of the movie i was only HALF confused...The beginning has to do with a young girl Molly Kellar, who is on an island with some of her friends, when they all begin to be slaughtered.
Her death was pretty cool (Her acting sucked, but, thats alright) The movie continues on, and if you have seen it, u know it gets better.
They all meet up at the cabin where the big climax takes place, some people die, and Molly finds out, everything.Fast Track ANOTHER Five Years and well if you havent seen the movie, i wont give it away.Some things that i questioned and never found the answer to are this:                      Dont Read if You Havent Seen1.
Typical slasher movie about a copycat killer, with young people doing things that they shouldn't and getting butchered.
If you want to see a good movie dealing with Jack the Ripper, the choices are: "The Ruling Class" (Peter O'Toole's character ends up believing himself to be Jack the Ripper); "Time After Time" (H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper into 1970s San Francisco); and "From Hell" (Johnny Depp plays a detective investigating the murders in 1880s London).
Students at a college campus fall prey to a killer who uses Jack the Ripper as the inspiration for his killings.
It is an honest to goodness horror movie, not some cheap slasher flick.
One of the good aspects of this movie is that it not just a slasher, as it has many elements of a serial killer thriller.
It is a shame that this movie didn't get a wide cinema release, as it is much better than most of the slasher dribble that has been released of late (Valentine, Urban Legends: Final Cut) The best thing would have to be the ending, which will have you guessing up until the final scene.
I recommend you watch this movie, and keep an eye out for other straight to video horror flicks,  as they seem to be the best at the moment (Ginger Snap's for example)..
The movie tries to be a serial killer thriller even though it's obviously just another teen slasher flick.
The killer doesn't wear a mask (well except for in the first murder) and we only get to see a hand killing people (like the Italian giallo flick which we have come to love so much).
It starts out as a pretty good teen slasher flick but it feels a bit too ambitious and the ending is a complete mess.
Either way, Ripper is an all right movie over-all but it tries too hard to be something more than it really is; a shameless Scream rip-off which was released a bit too late to become really famous.
This IS a movie with connections to Jack the Ripper.
Overall, Ripper: Letter from hell is a fun movie to watch on a friday night when your all alone in the dark.
i say if a horror movie is bloody, gory, and fun, its a good movie(especally the fun part), if the movie is scary its an added bonus, this movie isn't scary but its bloody, gory, and fun, plus i thought the acting was good with likable characters(except that french girl, i was waiting for her to die), and i like the plot they put in there, and this movie made me a fan of a.j. cook.(who is canadian, thank you) something that could have been fixed is the ending, i've seen it 3 times and i still don't get it.
Last night, I rented a movie entitled RIPPER: LETTER FROM HELL from Blockbuster (thank god I didn't buy it) and when I began watching it, I was already worried by the opening of the first scene.
A killer begins going around cutting people up in the same kind of style that Jack the Ripper (that's me!) killed his victims.
As the past re-awakens, Molly is forced to face the terrifying secret behind the stalker's return, and the entire class soon realises that it's a history that they don't want to repeat.This film starred: A.J. Cook, Bruce Payne & Jurgen Prochnow.RIPPER was released in 2001 and is a slasher film based on Jack the Ripper.
So not very surprisingly this is a slow and boring horror film based on a Jack the Ripper copycat killer.
One of the classmates, the main character, was stalked by a killer herself in the beginning of the movie.
i purchased th film ripper at a cheap pound shop and could not believe it when i watched it to as in how amazing it is, it is a real shocker for a film that isn't well known, the plot is amazing and the actors do a fantastic job, so highly recommended, however as you get so into the film and can't wait to find out who the killer is it is a real shock as to the end when you don't actually find out who it is, fair enough it is betrayed to be kane but i am thinking it is more likely to be molly, i understand that by adding this twist it really does hold you wanting more, but is kind of frustrating i have now watched this film over 5 or 6 times and still have no idea who it it each time i look for more clues but still not really sure.
The plot of the film is basically this: Molly gets dissed by all these people when she's younger and escapes death when all these people she is hanging out with on an island are killed by a serial killer.
*Then* the people who she is in a study group with begin to get killed one by one and each in the style of Jack the Ripper.
"Ripper: Letter From Hell" is a very good movie but I was a litlle dissapointed with the ending: I didn't like it.The cast and acting is the best that I've seen recently.
It was very original the first death and having the killer spending more time with his victims than the regular slash film.
It would have been so much better if a friend turned out to be the killer and had some screwball motive (a la "Urban Legend") rather than a contrived mixed-up and ultimately pretentious conclusion.SUMMARY - Good suspensful death scenes mixed up in a film with too many ideas that even the director could not control.**/*****.
I haven't seen a good horror movie since Scream 3, and this one reminded me of it.
Several of the scenes kept me guessing as to who the killer was, and I enjoyed the movie the entire way through.