Director/Screenplay – Steve Lawson, Photography – Jon O’Neill, Music – Michael Vignola, Makeup Effects – Stephanie Harrison. Production Company – Creativ Studios Ltd.
Jonathan Hansler (Thomas Locque), Phil Molloy (Inspector Edmond Rees), Sylvia Robson (Elizabeth Locque), Chris Bell (Stubb), Dawn Butler (Miss Levine), Barry Shannon (Dr George Lowry), Jacob Anderton (Dodd)
London, 1888. Police inspector Edmond Rees and coroner Thomas Locque try to make sense of a series of murders of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area. Things are not helped by Stubb, a reporter who writes sensationalistic accounts of the case in the newspaper and somehow has access to inside information. Upon examination of the bodies, Rees becomes certain that the Ripper is someone who has expert medical knowledge.
Steve Lawson is a director who has gained a modest reputation as director of horror works on a low budget, often set in the Victorian period. Lawson made several action films beginning with Insiders (2002) and then moved to genre material with likes of The Silencer (2007), Nocturnal Activity (2014), KillerSaurus (2015), Survival Instinct (2016), Hellriser (2017), Aura (2018), Pentagram (2019), The Haunting of Alcatraz (2020), Bram Stoker’s Van Helsing (2021), Jekyll and Hyde (2021), Saltwater: The Battle for Ramree Island (2021), The Highwayman (2022), The Mummy: Resurrection (2022), Wrath of Dracula (2023) and Ship of the Damned (2024), plus the documentaries UFO Conspiracies: The Hidden Truth (2020) and Alien Conspiracies: The Hidden Truth (2023).
The Jack the Ripper killings exist in infamy. These consisted of the murder of five prostitutes over a four-month period in 1888 in London’s impoverished Whitechapel district. The identity of the Ripper was never solved, although this has not stopped a vast industry of speculation ever since with suspects ranging from the plausible to entirely fanciful. There have been a considerable number of films on the subject – for greater detail see Jack the Ripper Films.
Ripper Untold adheres to the details of the Ripper case no more, no less than any other version. Here the victims are prostitutes and have similar soundalike names to the actual victims – on the other hand, the victims we do see seems far too well dressed for prostitutes in Whitechapel circa 1888 who were the poorest of the poor. There are also scenes where detective Phil Molloy goes to ask questions of madame Dawn Butler about the girls, whereas the real victims were way below employment in a brothel – they were alcoholics and street hookers living in utterly impoverished surrounds.
The principal investigators are a police detective and a coroner, although both are original characters not directly based on any historical figures. The film does adhere to one or two more details of the case than some of the other Jack the Ripper films. There is mention of the Dear Boss letters and to the film’s credit it does go with the general consensus among Ripperologists that these were faked by newspapermen. There is also mention made of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. One part of Ripperology that the film draws on quite heavily is the long discredited notion that the cuts to the victims were made with medical precisions therefore the Ripper had to be a surgeon. There is nothing about any of Ripper Untold that lives up to the ‘untold’ part of the title.
The film gets a passable approximation of Victorian England on a budget. The big downside is that the film has a slow pace. Most of it consists of people sitting around in rooms and talking to one another. The film however does arrive at a decent twist ending and revelation of the Ripper’s real identity and motivation, which has been cleverly hinted at and led up to throughout.
Ripper’s Revenge (2023) was a sequel also from Steve Lawson.
The other Jack the Ripper films include:- those that conduct supposedly straight tellings of the details of the case such as Jack the Ripper (1959), the Spanish Jack the Ripper of London (1971) with Paul Naschy, Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper (1976) with Klaus Kinski, Jack the Ripper (tv mini-series, 1988) starring Michael Caine, The Ripper (1997), the Alan Moore graphic novel adaptation From Hell (2001) with Johnny Depp, and the German Jack the Ripper (2016). There are a number of other works that feature The Ripper as a central character like The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), The Lodger (1944), Room to Let (1950) and Man in the Attic (1953), although most of these vary widely from the known details. More prevalent have been speculative treatments, including the likes of:- having the contemporary but fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes solve the mystery in A Study in Terror (1965), Murder By Decree (1979) and Holmes & Watson: Madrid Days (2012); the Ripper being an alien spirit that possesses Scotty in Star Trek‘s Wolf in the Fold (1966) and with similar stories occurring in episodes of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-5) and The Outer Limits (1995-2002); the Ripper being Dr Jekyll in both Dr Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971) and Edge of Sanity (1989); Jack the Ripper’s daughter featuring in Hands of the Ripper (1971); H.G. Wells and the Ripper travelling through time to the present day in Time After Time (1979) and its tv series remake Time After Time (2017), as well as a time-travelling Ripper appearing in episodes of tv series like Fantasy Island (1977-84), Goodnight Sweetheart (1993-9) and Timecop (1997-8); The Ripper having travelled out West in the Knife in the Darkness (1968) episode of the Western tv series Cimarron Strip (1967-8) and the film From Hell to the Wild West (2017);The Ripper being resurrected or copycated in the present day in The Ripper (1985), Bridge Across Time/Terror at London Bridge (1985), Jack’s Back (1988), Ripper: Letter from Hell (2001), Bad Karma (2002), The Legend of Bloody Jack (2007), The Lodger (2009) and Whitechapel (tv mini-series, 2009); a parody segment of Amazon Women on the Moon (1987) that speculates that the Ripper was in fact the Loch Ness Monster; the Babylon 5 episode Comes the Inquisitor (1995) that reveals the Ripper was taken up by aliens and redeemed; transposed to Gotham City in the animated Batman: Gotham By Gaslight (2018); even turning up as a character in the French animated film Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart (2013). Also of interest is the tv series Ripper Street (2012-6), a detective series set in London in the immediate aftermath of the Ripper killings.
Trailer here