Directed by Jess Franco
Written by Jess Franco
Starring:
- Klaus Kinski – Dr. Dennis Orloff / Jack the Ripper
- Josephine Chaplin – Cynthia
- Andreas Mannkopff – Inspector Selby
- Herbert Fux – Charlie, the Fisherman
- Lina Romay – Marika Stevenson
Rating: 
Jess Franco had a trick up his sleeve, and he used it like clockwork—whenever his narrative gears started grinding or the plot got too foggy to follow, he whipped out Lina Romay. Not just any shot, but a brazen, in-your-face, full-frontal tableau of his muse doing something completely gratuitous and entirely hypnotic. It’s his sleazy cinematic CPR. In this 1976 Swiss-German gut-pile of a film about the most infamous butcher of them all, the story stalls—so what does Franco do? He cuts to Romay’s bouncing behind mid-burlesque in some gaudy London brothel. Most directors would get called tasteless for pulling a stunt like that, but Franco? He’s a certified sex shaman. One flash of flesh and the whole film jolts back to life.
Franco’s Jack the Ripper is among the most peculiar and inward-facing versions of the tale ever filmed. This isn’t a mystery wrapped in enigma and sleuthwork; it’s a descent into the battered psyche of the killer himself. From the very beginning, Franco dispenses with the whodunit—there’s no pretense of suspense—and instead lays bare the Ripper’s identity, inviting us into his fractured interior world. The horror here emerges not from the unknown, but from witnessing the disturbed, disordered impulses that fuel the violence. Rather than reveling in gothic atmospherics alone, the film reads more as a psychological period piece punctuated by scenes of explosive, grotesque gore.
Klaus Kinski—maniacal, fevered, and unrelentingly intense—proves an eerily fitting choice to embody Jack the Ripper, a spectral predator slithering through the fog-bound alleys of Victorian London. Here, the killer’s cruelty is not cloaked in mystery but rooted in personal anguish: a misogyny born of maternal shame, sharpened into violence against the very embodiment of desire—promiscuous women. Franco’s Ripper becomes a tormented inquisitor, driven by a twisted moral fervor, purging the streets of female concupiscence in some deranged service to Victorian propriety. It’s a profound psychosexual inversion of the legend, and Franco embraces it with his usual brazenness, delivering a gleefully indecorous spectacle for the base appetites of his cult audience.
Say what you will about the sleaze, but Jack the Ripper looks incredible. That’s thanks to Swiss exploitation king Erwin C. Dietrich—the guy behind some of Europe’s wildest trash, from Nazi shock flicks to nuns gone wild. He knew what kind of movies he was making, full of provocation and sex and violence, but he never let them look like garbage. Dietrich treated smut with real visual care. And Franco, under his wing, keeps up. This might be the most gorgeously shot film in Franco’s catalog—full of cold, sober lighting and painterly compositions. The beauty doesn’t add much to the story, but it gives the whole thing a strange elegance, a sensual texture that makes the gore and grime go down easier.
So why doesn’t Jack the Ripper qualify as one of Uncle Jess’s true masterpieces? Simply put, the storytelling suffers from the unnecessary drag of an overly talkative setup and ends with a rather anti-climactic whimper. Yet, even with those flaws, the film features moments of perverse brilliance—especially when Klaus Kinski dives into Franco’s depraved world. These histrionic detours make space for scenes that feel like essential entries in the filmography of Jess Franco, a director equally hated and adored. Chief among them is the disturbingly prolonged, morbidly erotic murder sequence of Lina Romay’s character at the hands of Kinski’s Jack—a scene so barbaric, so unrelentingly sleazy, it ranks among the most brutal acts of violent porn ever committed to the Euro sleaze canon. If that’s your thing, trust me: enduring the soporific stretches is worth it for the unfiltered, raw cinematic force of Franco at his most viciously effective—stripped of irony, stripped of smirk.
