As most people who comment negatively on DTV slasher films have only ever seen the Scream trilogy and I Know What You Did Last Summer, they can't be expected to construct a comparative view of what is really a film that excels the others of its ilk on production values alone.
Although surface gloss is by no means compensation for a good strong story, Ripper has a whole lot more plot than some its commercially released contemporaries without abandoning the simplicity of the slasher conventions: a group of student taking a course in serial killer profiling are offed by a mystery murderer who bases the slayings on the most famous serial killer of them all - Jack the Ripper.
Storywise, this is really a combo of Copycat and Urban Legend but, for the most part, succeeds in creating an ongoing ambiguity over the killers identity (something that is never honestly made clear at the end), but the ingenuity lies in the styling leading up to the finale. The unsympathetic teenagers are first excited at the chance to do some detective work of their own, then they're curious as it becomes obvious they're somewhere on his list before fighting amongst themselves and ending up hacked to pieces.
I wouldn't give any of the twists away, but Ripper is a largely satisfactory venture with a level of stylish (though sometimes misogynistic) violence that has been absent in recent horror outings and echoes the early days of Friday the 13th with a bit more visual flair. 8 out of 10.
Although surface gloss is by no means compensation for a good strong story, Ripper has a whole lot more plot than some its commercially released contemporaries without abandoning the simplicity of the slasher conventions: a group of student taking a course in serial killer profiling are offed by a mystery murderer who bases the slayings on the most famous serial killer of them all - Jack the Ripper.
Storywise, this is really a combo of Copycat and Urban Legend but, for the most part, succeeds in creating an ongoing ambiguity over the killers identity (something that is never honestly made clear at the end), but the ingenuity lies in the styling leading up to the finale. The unsympathetic teenagers are first excited at the chance to do some detective work of their own, then they're curious as it becomes obvious they're somewhere on his list before fighting amongst themselves and ending up hacked to pieces.
I wouldn't give any of the twists away, but Ripper is a largely satisfactory venture with a level of stylish (though sometimes misogynistic) violence that has been absent in recent horror outings and echoes the early days of Friday the 13th with a bit more visual flair. 8 out of 10.