The Grand Master Ripper was released at the height of popular slasher movies such as Scream, Halloween, and Friday the 13th. It's no surprise that Ripper made a quiet entry via direct to video because I had not heard of this movie until I saw this on the New Release shelf. I didn't think much of it until I rented this on video. To sum it all up: this was a terrible movie that I saw mostly on fast forward.The derivative, uninspiring, yawn-inducing plot is summed up in a few sentences. A sole survivor of a massacre (A.J. Cook, Final Destination 2) studies serial killers under a famous Forensic Science expert (Bruce Payne, Passenger 57), but her classmates soon start dying at the hands of a serial killer who is replicating the infamous killer Jack the Ripper. A police detective (Jürgen Prochnow, Das Boot) is tasked to investigate the murders. How original, right? The movie was uninteresting, unoriginal, and worst of all extremely lame. Despite watching most of this movie on fast forward it was a total waste of time and I had wasted whatever rental fee (it may have been $6.00 back in 2002) it was that I paid to rent this movie from the local video shop.Ripper was a rip off and a complete waste of time. Avoid this atrocity of a movie.1/10.

Lee Eisenberg Typical slasher movie about a copycat killer, with young people doing things that they shouldn't and getting butchered. I could pretty much predict everything that was going to happen. You'd think that something focusing on Jack the Ripper might be a little more interesting, but "Ripper" doesn't cut it. The most befuddling thing is that Jurgen Prochnow stars in this. He played the submarine captain in "Das Boot" and the terrorist leader in "Air Force One", so what's he doing here? If you want to see a good movie dealing with Jack the Ripper, the choices are: "The Ruling Class" (Peter O'Toole's character ends up believing himself to be Jack the Ripper); "Time After Time" (H.G. Wells chases Jack the Ripper into 1970s San Francisco); and "From Hell" (Johnny Depp plays a detective investigating the murders in 1880s London). And of course some people might include "Dr. Strangelove" (Sterling Hayden plays Gen. Jack Ripper).All in all, you'll do best to avoid this one.

BA_Harrison Molly Keller (A. J. Cook), the only survivor of a violent massacre when she was sixteen, is now a student enrolled in a forensic science course at Berkeley. When her fellow classmates start dying at the hands of a mystery killer, who is following the modus operandi of the infamous Jack the Ripper, she suspects that the murderer from her past is back to finish the job.Molly and the remaining students from her study group pool their profiling talents in an attempt to discover the identity of the maniac.Director John Eyres directs this slab of stalk 'n slash with both eyes firmly fixed on the teen market, and what may have been a nice addition to the genre becomes an annoying and unwatchable piece of garbage due to its MTV trappings. So obnoxious are the trendy narcissistic teens that make up teacher Marshall Kane's (Bruce Payne) class of wannabe Clarice Starlings, that you'll find yourself rooting for the killer. Main character Molly is perhaps the most annoying character of all; her emotionally troubled, spunky, grunge-chic heroine is carefully designed to appeal to the widest possible teenage demographic; angst-ridden loners, trendy fashion followers, horny guys—she's supposed to appeal to them all. Well I'm not a teenager anymore, and I hated her with a passion! And while I'm having a rant about the students, could someone please explain to me how they all became so damn erudite. From hacking into a police computer undetected, to conducting an autopsy, to fixing a satellite dish, nothing seemed to be beyond their capabilities.And now onto the death scenes. The first murder is the most impressive—a multiple stabbing followed by defenestration—and it is also the bloodiest. The rest of the killings are relatively gore free and disappointing. The nastiest deaths actually occur by accident, when two characters fall in front of the whirring buzz blades of a sawmill.Toward the end of this drivel, which at 115 minutes is way too long, I gave up following the ludicrous plot. There was some rubbish about the victims sharing the same initials as those killed by Jack the Ripper, a pointless (non-explicit) sex scene, and various characters were revealed as red herrings. The finale is completely confusing and I ended up unsure as to who the killer really was.Apparently, the director deliberately wanted the ending to be ambiguous, with the viewer making their own mind up about who was responsible. Well I'm not going to be ambiguous about what I think of this film—it was awful.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki I rented this movie thinking that with a title like "Ripper: Letters from Hell" that it might have something - anything, to do with Jack the Ripper. WRONG! This movie starts off with a young girl surviving a serial killer's attacks, than jumps forward several years to her as a college student studying other serial killers and obsessed with all things Gothic (the girl is obnoxious, so you have no interest in her or anything she's doing here) Then, about 45 minutes into the movie, someone mercifully starts killing off the various assortment of college low life, and the characters seem to think that the killings are reminiscent of Jack the Ripper's killings over a century earlier. This connection is nominal and if you don't pay attention you'll miss it entirely - and the ending of this horrendously overlong movie explains nothing, which is extremely aggravating and anticlimactic. They figured that if they just automatically set it up for a sequel they could get away with the movie not making any sense, and the gaping holes in the plot, and whoever does a sequel will either have to explain that themselves, or it won't be mentioned at all, and either way the makers of this movie would be off the hook for any resolution to this story.Indeed, there are more violent and gory movies than this, there are movies with pointless endings like this, but this one somehow manages to beat all of them and take the cake for some reason. This is a loud, boring, obnoxious movie that just goes on forever, not even good for unintentional humour since it takes itself way too seriously for that. There's utterly no redeeming quality or value to this one at all.