German/Switzerland/Spain co-production dealing with a serial killer -Jack the Ripper- in London executing his some grisly killings and starred by Klaus Kinski giving overacting , in a really psychotic interpretation , as he knows the schizoid territory thanks to his other usual performances . Murders committed by Jack the Ripper terrorize Whitechapel neighborhood . He's a respected pysician by day , and a murderer at night . As a doctor is as a tenant at a house owns a landlady but by night he becomes Jack the Ripper . Kinski stars a man who checks into a boardinghouse and becomes the object of scrutiny when a series of murders plague the area . As in the Whitechapel slum , a hulking figure prowls in the obscurity , a woman's screams , while the camera stares blindly into a music hall . Jack is out of control , as he transforms into the ominous killer dismembering London prostitutes by night . He searches for his prey in the London streets , as prostitutes at night and eventually at a brothel until the local Inspector's girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) goes undercover to catch him . Close your eyes and whisper his name... Probing eyes that marked the woman he loved for death! The Story of Jack the Ripper . Psycho is over the edge !. Pyschopatic, pure evil, perverted!.Terror...To freeze Your Heart ! Romance ...To Warm it! Fascinating beauty ...that marked her for Death ¡

This is a moving and horrific story about astonishing oddly murders in Whitechapel whose elusive killer results to be the famous Jack the Ripper. Grim and scary film with chills , thrills , sleaziness , ugly scenes, nudism and lots of blood and gore . Peculiar thriller remains as a special piece on surprises , showcasing the unique visual , zooms and ordinary stylistic tricks that would mark Jess Frank 's work . Resulting to be a tense film about murders with chills , suspense , gory scenes and an amazing final . This intriguing and thrilling story based on a script by prestigious Jean Claude Carriere , though uncredited , and Jess Frank himself . One of the outlandish evocations of this strange Spanish director , this time in the fogbound London of Jack the Ripper . Kinski gives a creepy , remarkable portrayal of perverted sexuality and a psychologically unstable man. . Along with Kinski here appear some familiar faces as Josephine Chaplin, Charles Chaplin's daugher , Herbert Fux , and of course , Lina Romay .This is one of the rate movies in which everything pulls together to create a weirdly compulsive atmosphere with plenty of fog , darkness , lights and shades , well shown on the photography . The production design is acceptable and passable interpretations , but the film is neither for squeamish people , nor for the easily queazy . There are also available several and unrated versions . The motion picture was professionally directed by prolific Jesus Franco, though it has some zooms , flaws , gaps and failures . In many of the more than 200 films he's directed he has also worked as composer, writer, cinematographer and editor. His first was "We Are 18 Years Old" and the second picture was ¨Gritos en la Noche¨ (1962) , the best of all them , also titled "The Awful Dr. Orlof" , it's followed by various sequels such as El Secreto del Dr. Orloff (1964) aka "The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll" , " Orloff y el hombre invisible (1970) aka "Dr. Orloff's Invisible Monster" and finally "Faceless" (1987) . He also directed to the great Christopher Lee in 4 films : "The Bloody Judge" , ¨Count Dracula¨, ¨The Blood of Fu Manchu¨ and ¨The castle of Fu Manchu¨ . Jesús's influence has been notable all over Europe .

The Jack the Ripper character has been adapted on several occasions for cinema and television from the silent as ¨Pandora's box (1929) ¨ , multiple versions of ¨Lulu¨ a prostitute killed by Jack , ¨Murder by Decree¨ (1979) by Bob Clark with Christopher Plummer, James Mason , Anthony Quayle , John Gielgud , Susan Clark ; ¨Edge of Sanity¨by Gerard Kikoine with Anthony Perkins , Glynis Barber , Claudia Udy ; ¨From hell (2001)¨ by Albert Hughes with Johnny Depp , Heather Graham , Ian Holm and for TV in which appears as character in numerous series as ¨Jack the Ripper (1988)¨ played by Ray McNally and recently in ¨Sanctuary ¨ played by Christopher Heyerdahl , ¨The Lodger¨2009 by David Ondaatje with Simon Baker , Alfred Molina , Hope Davis , and several others .

Jess Franco is well known as one of the exploitation genre's most prolific directors so it was inevitable that he would get around to filming a version of the Jack the Ripper events before long. It was also inevitable that he would be less interested in the facts of the case than in delivering a film packed full of sleaze, nudity, and violence, as well as his customary directorial inelegance. I know the guy has his fans, but when he shoots a bunch of scenes in near total blackness and in others just veers off and zooms into a tree, I can't respect him. The editing on this film is poor and only a single scene is what I would call well directed: this is when victim Lina Romay is stalked through a foggy park at night. Great shots, all of them, up there with the most atmospheric of the Gothic horrors to come from '70s Europe, but for the rest of the film the direction is a bore.

The film is a co-production between Switzerland and West Germany and other than a few framing shots of Big Ben, was filmed abroad. I thought the settings looked quite nice. I also enjoyed the fact that much of the facts were changed; after all, there have been countless film versions of the Ripper story so the new elements – like Jack dumping body parts in the Thames – felt fresh and intriguing. In essence, of course, this is an excuse for lots of stalk-and-slash sequences of bloody Jack hunting his prostitute victims, and these scenes work because of Klaus Kinski. Really, I can't imagine anybody else who would have been better for the part during this period; he captures the madness of the killer through his eyes alone and he really is a frightening guy. Opposite him we get Franco regular Herbert Fux as a sleazy fisherman; Lina Romay as a short-lived victim and, in a bit of a casting coup, Josephine Chaplin as a copper's girlfriend. Chaplin was the daughter of silent movie star Charlie and I don't imagine he would have been very impressed by seeing her stripped and menaced here!

The print I watched – a horrid US version – is hilariously dubbed with bad British accents to represent Victorian London, although the language used – "prithee, kind sir," would have been more at home in Elizabethan England! Still, even with all the negatives, this is a dark and atmospheric film that probably fits best with the German wave of krimis from the 1960s. As such, it's one of Franco's most successful efforts, and an intriguing little slice of '70s Eurohorror even if the ending is a bit lacklustre.

A serial killer (Klaus Kinski) whose mother was a prostitute starts killing streetwalkers as a way of paying back his mother for her abuse.

How do we know this is a Jess Franco movie? Because it has a character named Dr. Orloff and features his muse, Lina Romay. Beyond that, I have not quite figured out what his directing trademarks are... his films range from decent to abysmal, so it is hard to pinpoint a running theme.

This happens to be one of the better ones. The copy I watched was taken from a terrible print and the dubbing is awful, but the overall mood and atmosphere is good, and the effects are above average (the eye is nasty, some of the gore is a bit gross). Maybe the one from Image Entertainment is better...