JACK THE RIPPER
Excruciatingly dull
I've read Jess Franco described as "at once the most prolific and the most incompetent horror director of all time". The IMDb seems to back up the first part - listing him as helming 116 movies under what looks like about fifty pseudonyms. As for the second part, the only evidence I have of its truth is the one Franco film I've seen, this one, and yeah, it sure backs that statement up.
Starring Klaus Kinski as a ridiculously boring incarnation of Saucy Jack, Jack The Ripper lurches along in its eighty-two minutes like a snail in a bodycast. One prays for something interesting to happen - anything, anything! - but so rarely does it come. The only good things about this movie are some really unpleasant gore (arguably a good thing, I guess, if sexual mutilation floats your boat; it doesn't float mine) in the form of Jack giving an unlucky lass an impromptu mastectomy and some marginally amusing mockery of some old lady's age.
My knowledge of the facts regarding Jack the Ripper is minimal, but it's my understanding that said facts have little to do with this film. That's fine - filmmakers are under no real obligation to present us with history. But you'd think that Franco would give us a story of Jack that didn't make us think he was history's most boring serial killer. And you'd think that with such a ham as Klaus Kinski in the title role, he'd give the man a chance to work his (often dubious) magic...but no. Kinski looks half-asleep in this one, alas.
(and a more off-topic musing - I've always wondered just what it was about Jack's methods that prompted so many to say that he cut "with the skill of a surgeon" and thus speculate that he actually was a surgeon.)
The dubbing is hilariously bad - check out one scene where one guy goes to the doctor's clinic to have a canker removed. While the doc (Jack, of course) rips this canker off, one chunk at a time (with all the skill of a shovelling gravedigger), this guy howls and moans and whimpers about the agony. Then Jack applies some iodine and all the guy has to say is a very calm "Oh, it burns." Yes, with a period on the end, not an exclamation point...and he doesn't say a peep after that.
Unrelentlingly dull and made with all the apparent passion of a loveless marriage of thirty years, Jack The Ripper makes me feel a little better that Franco's films are very few and far between around here. I was starting to worry that I was missing out on something. One lonely film may not be much to judge the man's output on, but it's plenty enough to dissuade me from going out of my way to find anything further from him. If I stumble across something, great, but otherwise, I'm leavin' the guy alone.