Mich störte auch die Art und Weise wie die Grundlage "Solche krassen Verbrechen können nur Frauen begehen!" belegt werden sollte. Da wird beispielsweise die Ehefrau des Mediziners wiederholt in einem wirklich schlechten Licht dargestellt: unattraktiv, von Geburt an verwöhnt, langweilig, eifersüchtig, launisch - und während der Taten sowohl total meschugge als auch super intelligent und durchtrieben. Nicht selten fragte ich mich wie es für diese Dame aus der englischen Oberschicht wohl wäre, wenn sie dieses Buch heute lesen könnte ... Before you can say "bad idea", Anna's latest customer has flashed a bit of jewellery at the girl, and she's gone into a trance. Ever the gentleman, he starts slapping her about a bit. When Bryan intervenes, she somehow gets messily (I'll probably be using that word a lot more) impaled on the door by a poker. At the moment we don't know who dunnit, but as this isn'tAgatha Christie's Poirot, and the title rather gives it away, it doesn't take an 'A' level in psychotic teenage girls to work it out. Now some of you might now also wonder why she committed five murders if she was just after Mary Kelly but the author has a perfectly reasonable explanation for that, too: Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman were just practise. After all killing and mutilating is hard work and you need to make sure that you can really do it even if you already have some knowledge about anatomy like Lizzie. And Lizzie knew about anatomy because her husband was a surgeon and she always watched him during operation...you know just like watching 8 seasons of Criminal Minds have made me a proper profiler. By about 12:15 a.m., Eddowes was awake and singing in the station. Before long, she began complaining about being detained, lamenting that she’d be in trouble when she got home. She then lay on the cold pavement and fell asleep, was roused by the police and arrested for drunkenness.

That's pretty much the movie: watch as the little slip of an adolescent girl commits bloody crimes. Very bloody, at that; I haven't seen all of Hammer's late filmography, but on first glance, I'd be inclined to say that Hands of the Ripper is the studio's goriest film. That's not setting the bar tremendously high, mind you: the Italian gialli pretty much all hit this level, and American films could on occasion rise to some extraordinary heights of gruesomeness. Still, there's at least one effect in the scene where Anna goes into the whore's quarter of London to continue Dad's work that has an effect that even made as jaded a horror veteran as myself perk up with a little "ew, that's gross". At the police station the police inspector [Norman Bird] interviews those people who were at the séance. He is puzzled because it would have taken a very strong person to impale Mrs Golding. He establishes that Mr & Mrs Wilson left first, followed by Pritchard and Michael, but no-one saw Dysart leave. Although Pritchard knows the truth, he saves Dysart's embarrassment by stating it could have been possible for Dysart to leave shortly afterwards without anyone seeing him and that he does not believe Dysart was the man he saw leaving after the murder. 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. Hooker with a Heart of Gold: When Anna escapes from her home in a trance, a Whitechapel prostitute thinks she's new to the job and takes her home to have a chat and give her better advice on the line of work. Unfortunately, Anna kills her.

This film contains examples of:

All of the evidence that Morris uses is well documented and he certainly does an excellent job of compiling and using all of the known facts. I find this theory and timeline to be perfectly plausible and would encourage others to rethink how they perceive the Ripper murders. Her body was found at 1.45am and local surgeon Dr George William Sequeira, who had been called to the crime scene, deduced that death had taken place only 10 minutes beforehand.

The police finally released her at about 1 a.m., right around the time when other officers were discovering the body of Elizabeth Stride. Im Buch wird viel erzählt, so manches zitiert, aber am Ende kriegt man als Leser gerade mal ein komplettes Kipling-Gedicht vorgelegt. Im Appendix. Ach herrje. Also arbeitet sich das Vater-Sohn-Gespann durch die zugänglichen Dokumente, um diesen Verdacht "ehrlich, genau und fehlerfrei" zu belegen. Das Ergebnis ihrer scheinbar *fruchtbaren* Forschung ist in diesem an sich überschaubar langen Buch zusammengetragen. Trotzdem lässt sich die Theorie relativ schlüssig lesen und man ist leicht versucht, ihr Glauben zu schenken. Ich halte die Möglichkeit eines weiblichen oder gar als Frau verkleideten Rippers für durchaus denkbar. Vielleicht war sogar ein Duo aus Mann und Frau am Werk - wer weiß?! Since the two above-mentioned murders [Stride and Eddowes] no fewer than 1,400 letters relating to the tragedies have been received by the police, and although the greater portion of these gratuitous communications were found to be of a trivial and even ridiculous character, still each one was thoroughly investigated.”When originally submitted to the BBFC in 1971, the film had a running time of 88:39 mins and suffered unidentified cuts. Whilst Wayne Kinsey's 2007 book Hammer Films: The Elstree Studio Years claims that the film only suffered one cut (a 1s shot of hatpins in a woman's eye), according to information that Tim Lucas has published at his online blog and in Video Watchdog, the Network and Carlton DVDs may retain at least one other BBFC-imposed cut, to a scene in which a character's throat is slashed (see here). This information is TBC and under investigation. (If true, this cut has persisted into all extant DVD and BD versions, all of which feature only one slash to the character's throat, not the three mentioned in the Video Watchdog article.) If you have any more information about the BBFC's original cuts to this film, please let us know via our forums. The Ripp-a arrives home, obviously a bit flustered, and proceeds to stab his wife to death when she susses just why he's been spending all those nights out and coming home covered in prostitutes' blood. This charming domestic scene is watched by their daughter, who is next seen (through the power of fading-in-and-out) as a young woman (Angharad Rees). She now lurks behind a grate in a fake medium's parlour, giving voice to people's ghostly relatives. Kelly was violent and shared his partner’s heavy drinking habits. Their relationship was strained and stormy. Hands of the Ripper" brings a new twist to this theme. Dr. John Pritchard is an eminent psychiatrist in Edwardian London who brings one of his patients, a young woman named Anna, into his home. This might seem a risky thing to do, as Pritchard is well aware (although the police are not) that Anna is not only mentally unstable but also a murderess. Pritchard, however, is an enthusiastic Freudian who believes that the new science of psychoanalysis will enable him not only to find out the cause of her murderous impulses but also to cure them.

Interestingly he mentions having read Patricia Cornwall's book on the Ripper and that he wasn't convinced by it (probably the only thing we have in common). Cornwall's theory is completely built around the fact that her favourite suspect had a deformed penis, couldn't have sex and so went for the 'secondary mechanisms'. So even if he dismisses her, he should at least have heard of the possibility of lust-murders that do not involve sexual assault. At a church Michael and Laura rehearse for their wedding attended also by Pritchard and Anna. Outside afterwards, Anna is worried about herself but Pritchard asks her to trust him. At a railway station, Michael meets his blind fiancée Laura [Jane Merrow] and they return to the Pritchard's house. Scratch away the grime of Catherine Eddowes existence – a young life snuffed out in the gin palaces and ghettos of Victorian London – and the terrible tragedy can be seen and scrutinised. It seemed to me that the relationship between the two felt a lot like the relationship between Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, at least towards the end of the film. Although Pritchard didn’t “Create” Anna he certainly didn’t really try to stop her and began to look at her as a father would his daughter. And in doing so, Pritchard also protected her much as a father would his daughter as well (At least until the end when he makes his feelings quite clear to Anna and the audience).Though Catherine Eddowes’ death happened near the end of the Ripper’s reign of terror — she was the fourth out of five known victims (after Annie Chapman and before Mary Jane Kelly) — the murder cemented the infamous legacy of the serial killer. Born in 1842 in England, Catherine Eddowes was the daughter of a tin plate worker. Not much is known for sure about her early life, as contemporary newspapers gave varying accounts of her history. In an interview with The Star on October 3, Kelly said, “When she did not come home at night I didn’t worry, for I thought her daughter might have asked her to stay over Sunday with her.” The publicity that followed the murder turned Catherine's funeral into an event. Thousands joined the procession, which included a wagon for relatives and a wagon for the press. Given the time it was made, and the flow of influences, we must suppose that Hands of the Ripper was taking its cues from the Italian horror industry, but I don't think that's quite right. The thing is, there's never a minute's doubt that Anna is the killer - not from us, and not really from the other characters. There is, I suppose, some mystery around whether psychosis or possession is responsible for her actions, but L.W. Davidson's screenplay doesn't really care about answering that question. I would go so far as to say that we have in this film one of the earliest direct antecedents to the slasher movie, in which we are invited to watch a string of violent murders with no pretext of a mystery behind them at all, as there would be in a giallo: Anna is more in the line of Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, a killer known to us from the outset, whose actions are meant tob e satisfying spectacle in and of themselves.

One lost detail highlights the depths that Catherine had sunk before being savaged. Her body was identified by a crude, botched tattoo scratched into the pale skin of her arm. She had been branded, in ink, with the initials “TC”. Asshole Victim: Anna's first victim after possessing Anna is her guardian, a con artist "medium" who sold her to be raped by an Ephebophile. Hopefully HANDS OF THE RIPPER will be a Hammer horror to arrive soon on DVD, complete, and well handled. With so much hooplah made about Hammer's most famous projects (HORROR OF DRACULA, CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, et.al.), it's a shame HANDS OF THE RIPPER often gets overlooked by fans, and therefore by the public as well. An expensive-looking, well acted, nicely scripted - and very gory - period piece, Hands Of The Ripper shows that when called for, Hammer could still deliver lush and reasonably intelligent gothics even into the 70s. Oh, I wanted this to be better. I love novel theories on the Whitechapel murders. I was fascinated by the "Jill the Ripper" hypothesis I'd seen very loosely referenced online, and I wanted more. Alas, this book is not the place to look. It latches onto a single person, a woman not even named in most of the literature, and comes just short of outright accusing her of the murders.This English production was directed by Peter Sasdy & was presumably an attempt by Hammer studios to try something different from it's well know Dracula & Frankenstein series of films, personally I really liked it for what it was even though I know it's not that well known or thought of that highly which is a shame. The script by L.W. Davidson was based on a short printed story by Edward Spencer Shew & seems to take itself very seriously which I thought it just about got away with, the basic concept is rather far fetched & silly but I thought it worked quite well & was something a bit different even if it unfolds in a slightly predictable & linear way. Some of the character's are a bit underdeveloped & some of them are a bit dull but that's probably how people behaved in Victorian London. The film moves along at a nice pace & is never boring plus it has a nice ending which seemed very fitting. The only thing which didn't really work for me was that it didn't take much for Anna to go into here trance & be possessed & since it was so easy why had it never happened before? Oh & I personally wouldn't let a person who had just slit my maids throat in cold blood walk around my house & do whatever she wanted especially while my family was there! The author is also rather desperate to convince that readers that it is totally obvious that the Ripper must have been a woman because the victims weren't sexually assaulted and a man would have done this. He repeats this over and over in almost every third chapter (he is rather fond of repeating things, I guess if you cut out all the repetitions you'd loose at least a third of the book). The eerie letter — which hinted at future murders — was received by the Central News Agency on September 27, 1888. Man merkt dem Buch schnell an, dass Morris Junior den Leser auf unterhaltsame und spannende Weise alle vollbrachten Gedankengänge nachverfolgen lassen will. Leider verrennt er sich dabei gerne mal, kommt vom Logikweg ab und nimmt dann an anderer Stelle erneut Anlauf, indem er bereits Gesagtes detailliert wiederholt. Ein roter Erzählfaden wird auf diese Weise unnötig ausgefranst, was den Leser erst stört und irgendwann richtig nervt.