USA. 2017.
Crew
Director/Screenplay/Photography – Rene Perez, Producer – Colin Bryant, Music – Guthrie Lowe, Visual Effects – Navid Sanati, Splatter Effects – Colin Bryant & Sean Story. Production Company – iDiC Entertainment/Von Metz Entertainment.
Cast
Robert Kovacs (Buchinski), Charlie Glackin (Francis Tumblety), Alanna Forte (Hannah), Nicole Stark (Lizzie Stark), Karin Brauns (Mrs Stanton), Ronald Dean Wright (Professor Moore), Colin Bryant (Marshall Peterson), Sammy Durrant (Lynn), Danielle Driscoll (Christina)
Plot
In the present-day, Lizzie Stark tells her professor her theory. She has found a diary in the archives written by Francis Tumblety, a man she can prove was Jack the Ripper. In the 1890s, Tumblety came to the Carson County, California and set up a town. There he would advertise for girls to work as saloon hostesses but would instead pursue and kill them while wearing a burlap mask. The only person who could track Tumblety was Buchinski but he was being hunted by law enforcement who believed him to be the killer.
Rene Perez is a low-budget director who has maintained a reasonable career in genre cinema throughout the 2010s. Perez first appeared with zombie Western The Dead and the Damned (2010) and subsequently went onto make Demon Hunter (2012), Alien Showdown: The Day the Old West Stood Still (2013), The Dead and the Damned and the Darkness (2014), The Burning Dead (2015), Prey for Death (2015), The Obsidian Curse (2016), Death Kiss (2018), Cabal (2020), Cry Havoc (2020) and Legend of Hawes (2022), plus a trilogy of slasher films Playing with Dolls (2015), Playing with Dolls: Bloodlust (2016) and Playing with Dolls: Havoc (2017) and a trilogy of fairytale adaptations with The Snow Queen (2013), Sleeping Beauty (2014) and Little Red Riding Hood (2015)
From Hell to the Wild West combines Rene Perez’s two main interests. One of these is making Westerns, or at least Westerns that are genre hybrids. The other is films about slasher movie-styled hulking maniacs who cover their faces in a mask (which here resembles a burlap bag with thick stitches all over it), as in the Playing With Dolls films and Cabal. There’s also Perez’s discovery Robert Kovacs, a Hungarian-born dead ringer for Charles Bronson who first appeared in Death Kiss, and is here employed as a gunman intended to draw association with Bronson’s work in assorted spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s. (The character is also named Buchinski, Bronson’s given surname).
The interesting twist that From Hell to the Wild West offers here is that Perez identifies the masked maniac as Francis Tumblety, thus making the killer into Jack the Ripper. Francis Tumblety (1833-1903) was an Irish-born immigrant to the US. He fled the US after facing criminal charges for posing as a doctor and selling quack remedies and relocated to England in the 1870s. Tumblety was living in a boarding house in Whitechapel during the time of the Ripper killings and was considered a potential suspect by police of the day. He was reported to have an extreme hatred of prostitutes, supposedly due to the fact that he had been married to one. The major thing against Tumblety is that he was much taller and does not match the physical description of the Ripper, as well as the fact that he would have been in his late fifties at the time of the killings. There is also no clear proof that Tumblety ever killed any women.
Rene Perez has at least done some reading about Tumblety – mention of his rumoured marriage to a prostitute – although is stretching it when he makes the untrue claim that the film is ‘Based on True Events’. Outside of the Tumblety namedrop, From Hell to the Wild West is a free riff on everything else. There is zero evidence that the Ripper liked to wear a mask when he killed women. Perez also has Tumbelty played by an actor who is six foot plus (Tumblety was 5’10”) and only around 40 when Tumblety would have been in his sixties at the 1890s. The most bizarrely entertaining innovation Perez offers is having the Ripper come to California where he appears to have either built or taken over a whole town (in actuality the Western recreation town of Bandit Town USA in California about 40 miles north of Fresno) where he lures women with the promise of jobs as ‘hostesses’ only to hunt and kill them.
The main problem with From Hell to the Wild West is that Rene Perez has a great idea and then just goes away and makes one of his regular films. It feels less like a film based on developing out its concept that it is one that alternate between scenes of various girls turning up in the town where they are pursued by Charlie Glackin interspersed with those with Robert Kovacs in the wild being hunted by other lawmen who suspect him as the killer. These latter scenes also fail to make decent use of Kovacs and his similarity to Bronson and near-perfect mimicry of Bronson’s tight-lipped acting style.
None of this much comes together as a plot. It is all stitched together by Nicole Stark as a student historian in the present who outlines her theories about Tumblety to her professor (Ronald Dean Wright). In the real world, the professor should have been given a D for her thesis for some of the incredibly specious leaps of reasoning she makes without any corroborating evidence.
Trailer here