But hey, let’s look at something else first. If you came across the following description in a book or an article, what do you think you’d conclude about the person it described?

He had “blue eyes that were as inscrutable and penetrating as his secret thoughts and piercing mind. One might almost have called him pretty, except for his mouth, which could narrow into a hard, cruel line.”

Inscrutable, penetrating, secret, piercing, (almost) pretty, hard, cruel. These are the adjectives you have to work with… and this is how Cornwell describes Sickert’s facial features in her opening chapter. Think she might be loading the dice a little bit?

Hey, I’m not trying to “read into” Cornwell’s text or “read between the lines.” But Cornwell is a novelist. As a novelist, she controls, through her words, much of the imagery that the reader will “see” while reading the description. And the imagery she uses here is actually rather “stock” imagery for describing the villain in a novel. Sickert’s eyes penetrate, his mind pierces (and what do knives do?). His eyes are inscrutable, his mind secretive… hmmm, so, he cannot be “read.” To look at him, you would never know what he was thinking. And then, there’s his mouth, hard and cruel. Not much interpretation needed there! She’s instructing you on what to think.

Through the descriptive power of language, Cornwell plants an image in the reader’s mind of a hard and cruel man… piercing, penetrating, and utterly secretive.

Another way of putting it is that Cornwell is using her descriptive powers in place of argument. She’s trying to sway the reader on a somewhat subliminal level. And yes, using adjectives suggestive of cruelty and the type of secrecy necessary to be the Ripper is an effective rhetorical strategy. But in an argument–which relies upon facts, and putting facts together through a logical process–it’s cheating. Sickert’s facial features are irrelevant to the question of whether or not he is Jack the Ripper (unless, of course, they match a well-known description of one of the men seen with one of the victims on the night she was murdered… which, so far as I know, they don’t). But with just the right wording, his features can be made to suggest that he is the Ripper.

Okay, let’s put aside my little language obsession for now. Are you ready for the big revelation? The one that absolutely proves that Sickert was more likely than anybody else to be Jack the Ripper?

Well, without providing any evidence at this point in the book (though she does provide substantive evidence later on), Sickert had a genital abnormality, and he’d had three surgeries for it by the time he was 5 years old. In fact, according to his own nephew (whom Cornwell interviewed), the abnormality was in his penis. From these facts, and some of Sickert’s artwork, Cornwell extrapolates that Sickert may have had a short stump of a penis.

Well, that’s all well and good. Based upon the evidence she presents later on, it may well be true. But it’s a hypothesis. The problem is that Cornwell takes her hypothesis and argues as if it’s a certainty. And she even gives her case a head-start. She plants the notion in the reader’s mind before ever presenting any evidence to support it.

Okay, so what are some of the ways that Cornwell runs with her hypothesis? Oh man. Here is where it really gets “good.” Actually, she piles one hypothesis on top of another hypothesis on top of another hypothesis, and before we know it, Cornwell has reached certainty. But I just have to wonder… If the foundation itself is a hypothesis, and everything built on top of th
at foundation is a hypothesis, then how do we get to a certainty–at least in the “real world” of logic? I mean, am I dense or something? Is it really really obvious that if a guy might have had a mutilated penis, and the guy’s painting mentor was getting married in a few days… that the guy would have been driven (at least temporarily) over the edge into murdering and mutilating women? Ooops. I’m getting a little ahead of myself here.

Anyway, here’s a little bit of the process that gets Cornwell to her certainty. First, like most Victorian gentlemen, Sickert liked to use pseudonyms in writing letters to the editors. Secondly, Sickert (Cornwell, by now, assumes) could not have normal relations with a woman.

Well, guess what? One of the letters written to the police (and signed pseudonymously by “Scotus”) speculates that the criminal may have had his “privy member destroyed” (i.e. his penis mutilated), and is taking it out on prostitutes. Consequently, Cornwell takes this Victorian gentleman’s speculation about the state of the killer’s genitalia as fact. And then, from there, she implies that the letter writer may have been Sickert himself! (I mean, Sickert did like to write under pseudonyms, didn’t he? Never mind that “Scotus” was not known to be one of them!). Maybe Sickert was just playing with the police, laughing at them.

So here’s the status of the Cornwellian logic at the moment: Some Victorian guy suggested that the killer might have had mutilated genitals, so that means that the killer must have had mutilated genitals… particularly since the letter suggesting that theory just might have been written pseudonymously by Walter Sickert (who just might have had mutilated genitals). In the real world, though, the “Scotus” letter really has no authority without any solid evidence of its significance. It’s just another of the many pseudonymous theories floating around London at the time.

Along these same lines… One of the letters to the editors was signed using (more or less) an identity that Sickert was known to use in his letters (and had even used on stage). The letter was signed “Nemo.” And Sickert was known to use the pseudonym “Mr. Nemo.” The author of the “Nemo” letter claimed that his time in India led him to believe that the murders were were using “peculiarly Eastern methods and universally recognized, and intended by the criminal classes to express insult, hatred, and contempt” (Times of London, 4 October, 1888).

Now, unless Sickert had spent time in India (or thought it would be fun to pretend he had spent time in India), it’s unlikely that the letter was written by him. But since “Nemo” is a name that is actually associated with Sickert (while “Scotus” is not), it’s much more likely that the “Nemo” letter was written by Sickert than that the “Scotus” letter was. (Cornwell, incidentally, never mentions the “Nemo” letter). I’m not quite sure why Cornwell thinks that the theory voiced in the “Scotus” letter carries any more weight than any of the other theories that were going around… except that this theory happens to be the one that best fits her pet suspect.

Well, once again, it looks like I’m going to have to stop, so I don’t start to bore you. But here’s where we are at the moment (getting repetitious?)… Sickert may have had genital mutilation which impaired his ability to engage in genital sex, and a letter signed “Scotus” speculated that the murderer roaming Whitechapel had mutilated genitals.

Next time… we finally get to dissect the Whistler hypothesis, which only works, by the way, if we first accept these these two other hypotheses as fact.

Hope you’re having fun. I’ll be finished with my first impressions on Thursday. What’s wild is that these first impressions only took a couple hours of reading and note-taking. But there’s just a lot to talk about.

Who knows, maybe when she gets into the forensic evidence stuff, she’ll start to argue on more solid ground.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

Well, last time I posted (I feel like I’m in a serial!), we learned that Sickert may have been sexually mutilated through surgeries in childhood. We also learned that one of the letter writers to Scotland Yard suggested that the Ripper was a sexually mutilated man. And last time, I also cautioned the reader to remember that, no matter how possible, the notion of Sickert’s mutilation is a hypothesis, not a known fact.

Yet, Cornwell takes this hypothesis and uses it to speculate on Sickert’s frame of mind right before the marriage of his mentor, James Abbott McNeill Whistler. She writes: “The anticipated connubial bliss of [Whistler] must have been disconcerting to his former errand boy-apprentice.” And that “Women were a dangerous reminder of an infuriating and humiliating secret that Sickert carried not only to the grave but beyond it, because cremated bodies reveal no tales of the flesh, even if they are exhumed.”

It must have been disconcerting? And women were a dangerous reminder of a humiliating secret? Well, for starters, Cornwell has just assumed the certainty of her hypothesis…. even though, as she herself admits, Sickert’s cremation makes it impossible to verify. (In fact, she almost implies–or perhaps does imply–that Sickert intentionally had himself cremated to wipe out the evidence of a physical debility that Cornwell is only speculating about). Secondly, she’s presuming to have access into Sickert’s mind and to know what he must have been thinking, how he must have been experiencing Whistler’s marriage. Yet, she has no direct access to that information because Sickert did not keep journals. Perhaps she is channeling Sickert?

Before she gets to the summation of these charges, let’s look at what is currently something of a side issue, but which will figure into Cornwell’s summation. She mentions that Sickert tended to read only stuff that affected him. He liked to see his name in the paper; he liked to read his own letters to the editor. And he loved to read about crime. In other words, he was somewhat narcissistic (as many artists are), and he was fascinated by crime stories. In fact, he had such an interest in crime that Sickert later drew sketches of murder scenes. Cornwell uses this evidence to damn him with the appellation “Jack the Ripper.” She assumes that this fascination is indicative of an unhinged and violent mind. And later in the book, she will argue that some of these artistic renderings may have been drawn of murders committed by the artist himself.

So, let me ask… Would you say that Patricia Cornwell has an interest in crime? She writes detective fiction and speculates on the identity of Jack the Ripper, doesn’t she? Judging by the fact that you are reading this, I would guess that you have some interest in crime. And I know I do. So, here we are… Walter Sickert liked to read about crime. I like to read about crime. You, right at this very moment, are reading about crime. Cornwell reads and writes about crime. Every Ripperologist in the world reads and theorizes on crime. Unless all of us (or even many of us) read about murder as a prelude to commiting murders of our own, then Sickert’s interest in crime seems about as sinister as mine or yours or Cornwell’s.

Ah, but as mentioned above, Sickert also liked to paint and draw crime scenes. (Never mind that he is much more famous for painting music halls!). Doesn’t that demonstrate a murderous inclination? The short answer? No!

Cornwell is a writer. She paints crime scenes with words. Sickert is a painter. He paints crime scenes with… well… paint (and pencil). Are we to assume that, because Sickert is a visual artist rather than a verbal artist, his portrayal of crime is somehow more sinister than Cornwell’s own portrayal of crime? Or, for that matter, Alfred Hitchcock’s visual/verbal portrayal of crime? Ummm, I think not. Each artist is using his or her own medium to artistically portray murder. Now, that’s not to say that Sickert is absolutely not Jack the Ripper. It’s simply to say that if the subjects of his artwork indicate an inclination towards murder, then we could say the same thing about Patricia Cornwell, Alfred Hitchcock, and any number of other visual and verbal artists.

Finally, Cornwell just pulls out the stops in her summation of the charges against Walter Sickert, as she writes: “For Walter Sickert to imagine Whistler in love and enjoying a sexual relationship with a woman might well have been the catalyst that made Sickert one of the most dangerous and confounding killers of all time. He began to act out what he had scripted most of his life, not only in thought but in boyhood sketches that depicted women being abducted, tied up, and stabbed.”

Okay, how much of that do I really need to parse at this point? We see, once again, Cornwell assuming the certainty of her hypothesis re: Sickert’s genitals. We see her beg the question, as she assumes the very thing she needs to prove in her argument… i.e. that Sickert actually was this killer. But we also see, in the final sentence, a rather tenuous grip on factuality. Without access to his thoughts, how does Cornwell know that Sickert scripted the actual performance of mutilations in his thoughts? And further, while the boyhood sketches depicting the murder of women may have been drawn by Sickert, they are actually part of a collection of his father’s artwork. Cornwell has no more certainty that these sketches were drawn by Sickert than she has certainty that Sickert wrote the “Scotus” letter. All she has is hypothesis.

And even if she knew for a fact that Walter , not Oswald, Sickert drew the sketches, would they necessarily indicate that he harbored murderous desires towards women?

And finally finally finally…

Cornwell ignores the “Nemo” letter to the editors of the Times of London (the letter about Eastern criminal methods). Yet in a set up to a major rhetorical flourish, she does make a point of “Nemo” having been Sickert’s stage name, only to instruct us that Sickert “dropped” this name “in the late summer of 1888 [and] he gave himself a new stage name that during his life would never be linked to him.”

Oh, the certainty of it all. Oh, the manipulation of it all! Need I tell you what that new stage name is? No, you know it. It has been played out on the world stage for over a century now. It is synonymous with evil and murder and blood on the streets of London in the fog.

But Cornwell’s flourish, no matter how effective rhetorically, still begs the question.

And Martha Tabram is still quite likely the victim of a different killer.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

On Hollywood Ripper, we have a listing of the women that nearly everybody agrees were killed by Jack the Ripper. We call them The Canonical 5. Martha Tabram is not on that list. This will be important information a little bit further down on the page.

Martha Tabram was murdered probably sometime between 2:00–3:30am on August 7, 1888. Her body was found on the first floor landing of the George Yard Buildings in Whitechapel. Here is a description of her wounds:

“The post-mortem examination of Martha Tabram was held by Dr. Timothy Robert Killeen (also spelled Keeling or Keleene) at 5:30 AM on the morning of August 7th. Tabram was described as a plump middle-aged woman, about 5’3″ tall, dark hair and complexion. The time of death was estimated at about three hours before the examination (around 2:30-2:45 AM). In all, there were thirty-nine stab wounds including:

•5 wounds (left lung)
•2 wounds (right lung)
•1 wound (heart)
•5 wounds (liver)
•2 wounds (spleen)
•6 wounds (stomach)

According to Killeen, the focus of the wounds were the breasts, belly, and groin area. In his opinion, all but one of the wounds were inflicted by a right-handed attacker, and all but one seemed to have been the result of an “ordinary pen-knife.” There was, however, one wound on the sternum which appeared to have been inflicted by a dagger or bayonet (thereby leading police to believe that a sailor was the perpetrator). “
(For more info, see Casebook: Jack the Ripper – Martha Tabram)

Martha Tabram was stabbed multiple times by her attacker, but her throat was not slashed. She had not been cut open. There were no organs missing from her body. She is generally viewed as the victim of some other killer, or an early “piece of work” by Jack the Ripper before he got his infamous modus operandi down.

The killing occurred, however, only 25 days before the first “canonical” Ripper murder. If it were the Ripper’s work, it would indicate an extremely quick transformation of his technique—from stabbing the exterior of a woman’s body to slashing the throat/ripping out her innards. However unlikely that swift a change would be, the Ripper definitely did show rapid development in his killing technique.

There was a tremendous difference in the level of mutilation committed between the first and fourth canonical murders (though they were only one month apart), and nobody even began to anticipate the level of mutilation he would commit in the fifth (about 5-6 weeks after the fourth). But regardless of all that, what needs to be said is that there’s no obvious sign of the Ripper’s work in the murder of Martha Tabram… as there is in the fifth canonical murder. Tabram is, at best, a controversial listing among alleged Ripper victims.

Now, what does this all have to do with Patricia Cornwell?

Well, the beginning of her story takes place during the evening of August 6—only hours before Martha Tabram’s body was found lying in a pool of blood in the George Yard buildings. August 6 had been a bank holiday. The streets had been full of activity—which Cornwell uses to set the stage for a little bit of innuendo.

Assuming at face value that Martha Tabram was murdered by Jack the Ripper, Cornwell mentions that during the holidy, people could buy costumes of soldiers and policemen with ease (and Martha Tabram had last been seen going off with a soldier). Well, coincidentally, Sickert had a theatrical background and enjoyed wearing costumes, and he also enjoyed disguising his identity in letters he wrote to the editors of various newspapers. (My note: the latter was a common practice at the time, with many letter writers scribbling their opinions pseudonymously).

Notice how we’ve travelled here from facts to innuendo, again using the underlying assumption that Sickert was the Ripper. There is no evidence that Sickert was on the streets on August 6, 1888. There is no evidence that he wasn’t. There is no evidence one way or the other. Neither can Patricia Cornwell produce a receipt for Sickert’s purchase of a soldier’s costume. However, since he must have been Jack the Ripper and since Martha Tabram must have been killed by Jack the Ripper, then Sickert must have been on the streets that night. So how do we account for the rather inconvenient fact that the man Tabram was seen going off with was in soldier’s uniform? Well, rather ingeniously, Patricia Cornwell drags out the notion that perhaps—no, definitely!—Sickert bought a costume so that he could look like a soldier. It’s a bit of a stretch, but as far as Cornwell’s concerned, it works.

Now, why, you ask, is it so important to Cornwell that Martha Tabram be one of the Ripper’s victims? Chronology. You see, Sickert’s mentor (the painter, James Abbott McNeill Whistler—yes, that Whistler) was getting married in a few days. Cornwell needs for us to believe that it was Whistler’s marriage that sent Sickert over the edge into murder. Why? Well, I’ll have to tell you that in the next installment because now I need to go do some other work.

But if you’d like to do some reading in the meantime, here are a couple of links to Stephen P. Ryder’s amazing Casebook website:

Casebook: Jack the Ripper – Victims
Casebook: Jack the Ripper – Walter Sickert

(Oh, and yes, I did read the Casebook’s primer to Cornwell’s accusations… nearly a year ago, and it’s brilliant. What I’m writing now, though, is based strictly upon my own examination of Cornwell’s text).

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

I think my first hint that this may not be the case occurred when I was flipping through the book, looking at the photos. In the very first section of photos, I came across a picture of Sickert’s first wife. But how is she captioned? As “the first wife of Walter Sickert, Ripper suspect”? (which would be the most intellectually honest way to do it). No, she’s captioned: “the daughter of a famous politician and the first wife of Jack the Ripper.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but when I read an argument (i.e. a piece of writing attempting to convince the reader of something), I want a fact-based, logical presentation of the case. Rhetorical bells and whistles are fine, but I don’t want to be manipulated into accepting an argument by rhetoric or repetition, and I do want the writer to anticipate potential objections to her case and refute them by using some type of evidence. This is what I taught my college students when I taught argumentative strategy at places like UCLA and Fullerton College. And it’s certainly what I expect from an argument written by a professional!

Instead, Cornwell loads her argument here, without having to produce evidence. She can just use a caption to make her argument for her, with no qualifier (like “first wife of the man most likely to have been Jack the Ripper”), and no indication of an opportunity for rebuttal. The caption to this photo “begs the question”–i.e. it assumes the very thing that it’s Cornwell’s job to prove.

Now, I’m not going to accuse Patricia Cornwell of sloppiness or dishonesty, but it is true that sloppy or intellectually dishonest writers try all the time to sway readers through these means. So today’s blog is really a lesson on the sorts of things to look out for when a writer crosses the line from legitimate argument into manipulation. And captioning a photo “first wife of Jack the Ripper” is nothing if not manipulative. I doing so, Cornwell is indicating her own certainty that Sickert is Jack the Ripper, and by that means is rhetorically bullying you to buy into her case.

Well, naturally, we assume that Cornwell will ultimately produce evidence of Sickert’s possible guilt in the actual content of her book, and eventually she does. So how is her presentation there? Is it tight? Is it sloppy? Does she leave a lot of hanging threads? Does she tie up her case nicely, by anticipating potential reader objections and refuting them?

Well, here’s one sample of a type of strategy she uses at least twice early on in the book: she mentions that since there was nothing really negative written about Sickert in his sister’s memoirs, entire sections of negative material must have been excised. Hello? She has no evidence that there ever was anything negative in the sister’s memoirs. All she knows is her own supposition that there must have been. And how does she know there must have been? Well, Sickert’s the Ripper, isn’t he?

One of the great divides in logic is between inductive and deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning looks first at facts and information. It draws its conclusions from those facts–just like Sherlock Holmes does. (And don’t let Arthur Conan Doyle’s language fool you. He got the label wrong for Holmes’ “Science of Deduction”–which he should actually have termed the “Science of Induction“).

Deductive reasoning begins with a general principle and applies it to an individual instance of that principle. The deductive process could be represented like this:

•All men are mortal (general principle)
•Socrates is a man (individual instance of
principle).
•Therefore, Socrates is mortal (the deductive conclusion).

Inductive reasoning argues up from the specific to the general. Deductive reasoning argues down from the general to the specific.

So let’s take a look at the deductive process that leads Cornwell to conclude that negative material must have been excised from the sister’s memoirs.

Her starting supposition is that Walter Sickert is Jack the Ripper. Now, we don’t know whether she based this notion on an inductive process or whether she made an intuitive leap and somehow just knew he was the Ripper. But we can determine that this underlying supposition leads to the following line of deductive reasoning.

•(Sickert is Jack the Ripper)
•Jack the Ripper’s sister would naturally write terrible things about her brother in her memoirs. (general principle)
•The published memoirs of Jack the Ripper’s sister do not contain terrible things about her brother. (individual instance)
•Therefore, the terrible things that Jack the Ripper’s sister must have written had to have been censored for publication. (deductive conclusion).

The conclusion is logical if we start with the supposition that Sickert is the Ripper (which, once again, is the very point that it’s Cornwell’s job to prove) and if we assume that he was an absolutely dreadful child and young man and that his sister would have wanted to write about how dreadful he was. (She, of course, would not have known he was the Ripper… just that he was a famous painter).

Can you see some of the issues here? And I haven’t even gotten to the opening chapter yet. But, I’ll be back in a couple of days to provide yet more analysis of Cornwell’s argumentative strategies. Since she does have one of the more popular Ripper theories on the market today, it’s certainly worthwhile for members of her potential audience to know how she is presenting the case, and whether the argument she presents stands up to analysis.

I also have to say that I have not gotten far into the book yet. She may settle down as she goes, and focus on fact, and even present a good case and a good argument. If that occurs, I’ll be sure to report it. I mean, I have no dog in this fight… except a love of language and a distaste for seeing it used in order to manipulate an audience.

See the Blogcritics posting of this artcle.

We had to talk about the Universal Monster Rallies of the 1940s (you know, the ones with Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolfman). We had to talk about the Toho series of Japanese monsters, and all those battles between Godzilla and his enemies from space. But the really cool part was making the discovery that we all were looking forward–with anticipation–to the first big Monster Rally in American cinema in over 50 years. We all wanted to see Freddy vs. Jason.

Me, I was hoping that it would be like a Toho movie… with Freddy and Jason just knocking each other down, brutalizing each other, going at each other like mad until you think one or the other is finished, only to see them both get up and come back for another round.

So when I heard that Freddy brings Jason back from the dead and sets him to work killing teens on Elm Street (so that Freddy will be remembered again and be able to come back to terrorize the children there), I couldn’t help but think that it sounded almost too good to be true. I mean, with a few changes (made necessary by the differences between these monsters), that’s basically the underlying plot from x-number of Godzilla movies from the late 60s and early 70s. In these movies, space aliens invariably find some way to control Godzilla and make him attack Tokyo so that they can bring in the space monsters and assume control of the earth. Inevitably, Godzilla escapes their control, and gets into a big brutal knock-down, tear-each-other-up battle with the space monsters.

I am happy to report that my wishes all came true. Freddy vs. Jason really is like a Toho Monster Rally, dressed up in a lot of Freddy and Jason garb. Wait, that’s not quite right. This is definitely a slasher movie with two slashers. Freddy and Jason aren’t just window dressing for an underlying Toho plot. Maybe the best way to put it is that the writers have found clever ways to weave the Freddy universe together with the Jason universe and come out with a reasonably seamless piece of cloth. What they’ve learned from the Japanese movies is how to culminate the picture in an entertaining monster battle.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the film. My only real criticism is that the actors seem to sleepwalk through the parts where they have to provide some necessary exposition (like “Who’s Freddy?” or “Who’s Jason?”… and “What are the rules for fighting Freddy?” or “What are the rules for fighting Jason?”). This is standard material for monster movies (like Van Helsing needing to tell his listeners what vampires are and how to fight them), but here there’s no energy behind the exposition. The actors play it more like “Ho-hum, gotta do some explaining now.”

But aside from that, the movie consists of a lot of action and a number of entertaining set-pieces. I mean, just imagine Jason arriving at a Rave all in flames, or Freddy entering Jason’s dreams to take him back to his original drowning (while a group of Elm Street kids drive a heavily tranquilized Jason back to Crystal Lake).

Oh, and as for the big monster battle… yeah, they do deliver. They fight on Freddy’s turf (in Jason’s dreams). They fight on Jason’s turf at Crystal Lake. They slash and bash and mangle each other, and they both go into the water at the end.

But I’ll leave it to you to find out who comes out the winner… if there is a winner indeed.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

THE BASIC PLOT: A young girl is abducted and electrocuted into remembering her previous life as “Agnes”–Jack the Ripper’s lover/accomplice. Assuming the “Agnes” persona, she seeks to reunite herself with the man she believes is the current incarnation of her former love–i.e. her psychiatrist in the High Security wing of a mental institution where she’s been incarcerated since murdering four prostitutes. When the psychiatrist, Trey Campbell, goes on an island vacation with his family, she escapes, horrifically murders a bunch of people, and shows up at the island to terrorize/abduct Trey’s wife and daughter. In the ruins of the “Capilla Blanca” (“White Chapel”) monastery, she finally convinces Trey of his former identity as Jack, but he doesn’t respond in quite the way she had hoped. But with his former identity revealed to him, the audience is still left to wonder whether he, too, will assume that old identity in his new life.

THE GOOD: Interesting concept for a Jack the Ripper film, even though it rather transparently blends the reincarnation drama of Dead Again with Fatal Attraction. Here, we’ve got a a former mistress–from a former life(!)—terrorizing the family of the man she is obsessed with (with the man of her obsession, naturally, not sharing the obsession).

Despite the plot similarities to Fatal Attraction, though, the chills here are more intense because this woman… well… she’s a slasher. She may not boil any bunnies, but she does have a penchant for removing people’s internal organs. Consequently, she’s just a whole lot scarier than Fatal Attraction’s Alex. And you can put that on the plus side for this film.

Hell’s Gate also features some good lighting, sets, and camera work (thanks, largely, to the expertise of veteran horror director John Hough). And Patsy Kensit acquits herself quite nicely in her portrayal of this psychotic female slasher.

THE BAD: Okay… There’s just a lot of bad acting in this film. Not the worst I’ve ever seen, but pretty bad nonetheless. Amy Locane is just dreadful as Trey’s wife Carly, except when she plays anger (an emotion that Amy does pretty well). The rest of the time, though, her acting is about on par with an understudy in the High School play! The police investigator–who actually gets a good bit of screen time–is even more poorly portrayed (which makes you kind of wonder if that’s why his name doesn’t show up in the credits… and can’t be found even on the Internet Movie Database!).

Hand-in-hand with the lousy acting is a good bit of sloppy scripting–much of it centering around the detective. He’s a mainland cop, but for some reason he also has a desk (with nameplate) on the island, which is presumably out of his jurisdiction. And when he asks for a DNA test on a burn victim suspected of being the escaped psychotic, he gets the results back within hours!!! Of course, none of that is as blatantly ridiculous as having the New England island that the family is vacationing on just happen to be the site for a ruined Spanish monastery with a name that translates “Whitechapel.” I mean, seriously???

Still, on the less-than-bad end of things, the ruined monastery does look pretty cool…

THE UGLY: Nearly every minor male character in the film is portrayed as a sex-starved sleazeball just dying to get into Agnes’ pants. Given how many guys seem incapable of keeping their hands off “Agnes” (before she whacks them), Hell’s Gate looks like it just couldn’t decide whether it wanted to restrain itself to the t&a slasher/gore gig, or go all the way into porn. It didn’t, but the atmosphere of sleaze permeates practically every scene containing a minor male character in proximity to “Agnes.”

In addition to the bad acting, there’s some “ugly” acting. As Trey’s daughter, Aimee O’Sullivan isn’t half as bad as her screen mother, but of her three moods (hyper-perky, sad, and terrified), hyper-perky is the one turned on throughout most of the movie. Still, she’s a child actor. She has room to grow.

But, then, we’re supposed to take Patrick Muldoon seriously as a psychiatrist? I mean, this guy has one of those “Just waiting to drink some beer and watch the football game” voices. It’s hard to translate that into a character with years and years of post-graduate education… and have the audience buy into it. Still, when he’s in Victorian costume and sporting a Brit accent, Muldoon is actually not bad as Jack the Ripper.

Despite all these criticisms, I’m not trying to pan the film. It’s a Direct-to-Video low budget B-movie. And (in that context), well, it’s not exactly good, but it’s still far far far away from the lower end of the DTV spectrum.

For a DTV movie, it gets about 2.5 out of 5 stars. But if it were a theatrical release, it would lose at least one of those stars.

(Footnote: For a good low-budget DTV movie, see Fred Olen Ray’s Invisible Mom).

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

Okay, you’re probably wondering what you’re doing looking at a Shanghai Knights when this is supposed to be a Ripper blog. Am I right? Well, on Hollywood Ripper, we cover all appearances by Jack the Ripper that we know about, even if his appearance is a small cameo. Well, Jack the Ripper makes a cameo appearance in Shanghai Knights.

BASIC PLOT: Okay, if you recall from Shanghai Noon, Jackie Chan’s character (Chon Wang) is an Imperial Guard in the Forbidden City, sent to America to retrieve the kidnapped Princess Pei-Pei. In Shanghai Knights, we see Wang’s father (keeper of the Imperial Seal) murdered and the Seal stolen by English noble, Lord Rathbone (Aiden Gillen). Wang’s sister, Chon Lin (Fann Wong), is sent after Rathbone to retrieve the seal. From London, she writes her brother, who travels from the western desert to New York to get his cut of the Shanghai Noon gold from old partner Roy O’Bannon (Owen Wilson). Instead they team up and venture to London, where they have a series of adventures in acculturating to England, fighting both English and Chinese bad guys, and (of course) retrieving the Imperial Seal.

THE RIPPER CAMEO: Chon Wang, Chon Lin, and Roy O’Bannon end up one night in Whitechapel… and it is, of course, 1888. They go into a brothel, a bunch of stuff happens(!), and Lin walks out angry, disgusted, and alone. Near the River, she is confronted by the psychotic killer who is terrorizing London–none other than Jack the Ripper himself. Using her spectacular martial arts footwork, Lin makes quick work of the Ripper, kicking him over the bridge railing and into the Thames below. And I assume, that’s the end of Jack the Ripper. He just messed with the wrong girl.

THE GOOD: Oh, gee, where do I start? First off, let me put my cards on the table: I love martial arts movies, and I think that Jackie Chan is one of the finest physical comedians in cinema history. So you might assume that it’s a given that I would like Shanghai Knights. But actually, since I’m not remotely a fan of Shanghai Noon (and since Owen Wilson is one of the few actors that I actively avoid watching on screen), all bets are off on this one. But yes, I did think that Shanghai Knights was loads of fun.

For starters, Owen Wilson is actually funny in it, which is certainly a plus in a comedy. Chan is always entertaining to watch, no matter what the movie, and in this film, his love of classic screen comedy really comes through. In Shanghai Knights, he pays tribute to a number of his screen heroes… including Gene Kelly (his favorite choreographer), Buster Keaton (his favorite physical comedian/stuntman), Charlie Chaplin, and even Harold Lloyd. Chan, of course, makes each of these elements his own–

as he mimics Buster Keaton gags…

as he draws Gene Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain choreography into his own fight choreography…

and as he imperils his characters on the minute hand of a huge clock tower (Big Ben???) in a clear tip of the hat to Harold Lloyd…

In addition to all the comedy-tribute hijinks, Singapore-Chinese actress Fann Wong is a real “find” for American cinema.

And Aiden Gill brings out the charm, the malevolence (and the gentlemanly love of a good swordfight) in his tensely smirky Lord Rathbone.

And then there’s Donnie Yen… I mean, can you believe that Jackie Chan has the self-assurance to put Donnie Yen in the movie… and let Yen actually win the Kung Fu fight on the barge??? (Chon Lin, of course, steps in before Yen’s evil Wu Chow dispatches her brother, but she wins by… cheating).

At any rate, this is, I believe, the first American Jackie Chan movie featuring another major Hong Kong martial arts star (eg. Iron Monkey), and Chan makes the most of it. In choreographing the fight, Chan gives Donnie Yen the animal Kung Fu styles and uses a more frenetically hybrid (Americanized?) style himself.

Kung Fu battles between major wushu artists are a staple of Hong Kong cinema, but I can’t remember seeing them in many American-produced martial arts films… at least, not since Bruce Lee dispatched Chuck Norris in Return of the Dragon!

THE BAD: Okay, this doesn’t bother me too much, but some people might really think it hurts the film… i.e. the plot is ludicrous and uses anachronism quite heavily. As for me, hey, I majored in English and learned way back in undergrad and grad school that realism and plausibility are actually latecomers to literary and performance art. Shakespeare is never very particular with the continuity of time (I mean, he’s got medieval lords in ancient pagan Britain, for goodness’ sake!), nor is he very particular with the plausibility of his stories (Midsummer Night’s Dream, anyone?), so why should Jackie Chan be–especially in a comedy? Still, anachronisms involving real historical personages can be a little bit unsettling. I mean, Charlie Chaplin was born in 1889… the year after the Ripper murders. He certainly would not have been running around London stealing stolen pocket watches at that time!

THE UGLY: Chan and Co. use the same gag at the end of Shanghai Knights that they used at the end of Rush Hour… i.e. falling from a great height holding on to a big piece of cloth. It works here because the cloth is a gigantic Union Jack. But I’d advise Chan to put this one to rest before it gets too rusty.

Links to get you started…

Shanghai Knights
Shanghai Knights — The Official Site (Some cool stuff here, including Jackie Chan’s diaries during the shoot)
Shanghai Knights (2003): Jackie Chan, Owen Wilson, Fann Wong, David Dobkin (a whole slew of reviews—most good, some bad—on the Rotten Tomatoes website)

<span class=”type”Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan interview – Jackie Chan on Shanghai Knights (In reality, it’s a short, entertaining article that talks to both Chan and Wilson)
The Official Jackie Chan Website (Jackie is very involved with this site, which really makes it more like a community than just a website)

Owen Wilson
World of Owen at Wilson-Brothers.com (Gee, I didn’t know Owen had a brother)

Donnie Yen
Donnie Yen’s Official Website (Another very good celebrity website)
Donnie Yen interviews – Fight choreographer and Shanghai Knights villain. (When I posted this in 2003, I had a short, but very good interview with Donnie Yen, done shortly before shooting Shanghai Knights. That link has now, so I’m providing a page of Google links to all sorts of Donnie Yen interviews)

<span class=”type”Fann Wong
Fann Wong in Wikipedia (When I first posted this, I had a listing of sites devoted to the young woman who plays Chon Lin in Shanghai Knights. That has since disappeared, so here’s the Wikipedia entry on this actress)

Aiden Gillen
Aiden Gillen in Wikipedia

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

The other day, I noticed that I was getting a number of hits from one of the Forum pages on the astounding Casebook: Jack the Ripper site. This happens from time to time when a particularly hot discussion is going on over there about Ripper movies. So I followed the link and found a far more intriguing discussion than I had imagined.

One researcher had found a reference to a 1914 Mexican film named “Destripador” (i.e. “Ripper”). That prompted Casebook Editor, Stephen Ryder, to provide info on several early Ripper titles he’d found via the Library of Congress.

I don’t know who this will interest, but it sure interested me! So here’s a link to a fabulous discussion involving Ripper (and possible Ripper) titles from before 1910… and even a turn-of-the-century look at Whitechapel.

Casebook: Jack the Ripper – Message Boards: 1914 Film

Oh, and while you’re over there, please check out the Casebook’s Mission Statement. It will be worth your time.

Thank you , Stephen, for remembering what the search for Jack the Ripper is truly about. And thanks, Casebook, for making the Ripper Lady’s work easy today!

I came across this one day at the video store. At the time, my husband didn’t want to rent it, but I kept my eye on it. Last night we finally saw it.

I really thought it was going to be terrible. It was clearly a Direct-To-Video production which had never seen theatrical release in the United States. And when I checked the Internet Movie Database to see whether or not it was even listed, I found a user review that went like this:

This movie helps the viewer gain a real insight into the minds of serial killers. It really does, because by the time this piece of utter garbage is over you want to do away with pretty much anybody who had anything to do with it. I mean anybody. The actors, director, writer, producer – even the best boy and key grip! They all need to be prevented from making any more movies.

Not a very promising start, I’d say.

But I sucked up my courage and stuck it in the DVD player. Turned out that it was actually a pretty decent little slice-and-dice teen slasher movie, but with a more sophisticated and clever plot. Now, admittedly, in order to appreciate it, you probably have to like teen slasher movies… and I know that a lot of you probably don’t. People who don’t have been giving this thing terrible reviews; people who do have been giving it excellent reviews. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground. You either think it’s the worst movie you’ve ever seen, or you think it’s totally brilliant.

BASIC PLOT: Ripper copycat movie, with an obvious, but fairly clever, nod to the SCREAM series (particularly SCREAM 2). Molly–the only survivor of a previous serial killer slaughter–takes a college class on the theory behind serial murder. Jack the Ripper, of course, is a primary focus of the course, especially since the professor is a well-known profiler who has written a book proving with DNA that the killer was (authentic Ripper suspect) Montague John Druitt. As the course progresses, students in the class start dying around the previous survivor, killed in ways that resemble the Ripper’s modus operandi. To complicate matters, the detective on the case is convinced that the killer they are facing is the same serial killer who nearly killed Molly five years earlier.

THE BAD:
1) After a really excellent, and intense, opening sequence, the film settles in on its first scene in a college classroom. In this scene, the behavior of the female students is way over-the-top, complete with brazen come-ons to the professor. In this scene–which introduces us to the characters–we come to believe that there is nothing resembling real people in this film. Thankfully, the rest of the film overcomes this problem. But some of the teens can still be pretty annoying.

2) The ending is mind-bending, which some people hate. (But I really love).

THE GOOD:
1) The makers of this film really did their homework on Jack the Ripper. The discussions of the case are extremely accurate. They’ve got the names of all the victims right. They have the killer’s M.O down to a tee. And they even manage to work all this Ripper stuff in to a plot that relies on the Ripper murders (and on elements of SCREAM 2), but without ever seeming too totally derivative or predictable. It’s commendably done.

2) The plot has more of the intrigue, amateur detective stuff and psychological issues involved in the giallo film, rather than just the rudimentary trappings of plot that most slasher movies possess. The film also has a lot of slasher and giallo in-jokes, which are fun for people who enjoy these sub-genres of horror. Ala nearly any Dario Argento movie, virtually the only thing we ever see of the killer is his black gloves. And, in a nod to Friday the 13th, kids are getting killed in the forest in the rain.

3) There are red herrings galore. The filmmakers establish about 5 or 6 people as potential suspects… at least in the viewers’ mind. And they play the potential suspects against each other, in typical Ripper (and yes, giallo) movie fashion.

4) The movie has a calculatedly grunge look that’s perfect for capturing the Pacific Northwest youth culture of this film. It also has terrific, adrenalin-pumping murder sequences, packed with suspense.

5) The ending is mind-bending, which some people (like me) really love.

This is actually one of the better Ripper copycat movies I’ve seen, and I think it’s actually the first Ripper-copycat sophisticated teen slasher movie that I’ve ever seen.

I rate it 7/10 (or 3.5 out of 5 stars).

At any rate, this film is an Italian giallo film, by ultraviolent filmmaker Lucio Fulci. The killer in this movie is extremely sadistic (in the film’s most famous scene, he slits a woman’s eyeball with a razor), and he taunts the NYPD by phoning them up and speaking in a duck-quack voice.

Though this film fits into the giallo subgenre of Italian horror, it is not really representative of gialli as a whole. The giallo subgenre generally combines murder mystery, high body count, variety of killing styles, dazzling cinematography, and the ultimate unraveling of the mystery… kind of like Halloween (part ONE!) and Friday the 13th (part ONE!)–though neither of those movies has the high cinematic style of the typical giallo.

FYI: gialli are pretty violent films. BUT in New York Ripper Lucio Fulci goes beyond the violence of the standard giallo film… particularly the gialli by filmmakers like Mario Bava and Dario Argento. That’s partly why I’m saying it’s not really a representative giallo. But in addition, it has a much more gritty look than any Bava or Argento giallo would. If you watch Bava’s Blood and Black Lace or Argento’s Deep Red—and then watch New York Ripper&mdash;you’ll quickly understand what I mean.

The ultraviolence in Fulci’s film is not really surprising, given that one of the script writers also contributed to the script of Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust… a movie so extreme that many people thought it was a snuff film. Actually, you could say it was so extreme that it got banned in ITALY!!! (I believe that it’s still banned to this day in the U.S.).

Despite its ultraviolence (and the fact that it’s not about Jack the Ripper), New York Ripper is well-made, presents an interesting mystery, and really explores the seedy side of New York. But this film is not recommended for anybody who does not have a very strong stomach or who does not want to watch extreme screen violence. I’m saying that as a critic who has seen the film for professional reasons, but who does not generally watch movies THIS violent for pleasure.

So consider yourselves warned! :-)

Resources:

Giallo, Visions of Terror: Giallo Movies—Good overview of giallo. This excellent horror movie site is friends with Hollywood Ripper. Pay them a visit!
Mario Bava, “Bava Speaks”—What the “creator” of giallo says about his work.
Dario Argento, Dark Dreams—A UK website devoted to the work of Dario Argento
Lucio Fulci, Official Lucio Fulci Website—includes a useful bio