My husband, Brian, is on vacation, so we watched Assault! Jack the Ripper (a.k.a. Boko! Kirisaki Jack) together yesterday. After it was over, Brian needed to get outside into the fresh air, do some yardwork, and take a shower.
What can I say about the movie? It’s not poorly made. It’s not poorly acted. It’s not even poorly scripted. But man, can I think of a lot of ways I would rather have spent my time!
I’m calling it “porn” even though it doesn’t show any genitalia. Actually, that’s not quite right. For the Ripper character, his razor-sharp blade becomes his genitalia. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
BASIC PLOT SUMMARY: When a waitress with a bad attitude asks a pastry cook to take her home in the rain, they get diverted by a female hitchhiker who immediately strips from the waist up and starts cutting herself with a knife. When they kick her out, she gets killed by her own insistence on hanging onto the side of the car. Okay, so they stash the body in a nearby junkyard, and in the process tear her body up pretty badly. Back at the waitress’s apartment, they have hot sex, made more “exciting” by the pastry cook’s having seen the dead woman’s blood. From then on, the waitress encourages him to commit murder so they can continue to have hot sex. He doesn’t just kill women though. He stabs them in the crotch, then slits them up through their lower torso. You know… pretty similar to Jack the Ripper’s modus operandi. In the process, the cook discovers that he prefers killing women to having sex with the waitress. He becomes more and more sexually detached from her, and starts killing more and more women more and more recklessly. (The equation of the knife with his genitals is obvious, by the way, as he begins to stash the knife in his pants on top of his crotch). By the way, this guy ultimately outdoes the Ripper’s “Double Event” with the butchery of 5 women at once in an apartment.
So what do you say about a movie like this? Yeah, it’s a Faux Ripper “find.” But it’s not quite what I was hoping to find.
THE GOOD: Though it’s a Faux Ripper film, the movie really does deliver a pretty plausible explanation for the types of crimes that Jack the Ripper himself committed. It has been said that the Ripper murders were sex crimes. Well, in this film, we see the progression from how a seemingly ordinary man’s sexual excitement at the sight of blood becomes a (sexual) addiction to shedding female blood… and how that in itself ultimately becomes a substitute for genital sexual expression. The murders in this film are clearly the expression of a twisted and perverted sexuality (a sexuality in which murder becomes an aphrodisiac)… quite similar to the violent sexuality of Peter Kuerten–Germany’s infamous Dusseldorf Ripper. Jess Franco attempts (much less successfully imho) to show this sort of perverted sexuality in his 1976 film Jack the Ripper (a.k.a. Der Dirnenmoerder von London), and so does Girard Kikoine in Edge of Sanity (1989). Unlike these two Jack the Ripper films, though, this 1976 Faux Ripper movie actually does a decent job with presenting the subject matter.
THE UGLY: Virtually everything else. The leading actor and actress do a good job of bringing these despicable characters to life, and the minor roles are played with conviction. But aside from some victims, there are very few likable people in this film.
THE BAD: Almost no discernible moral center. Brian thought there was none at all, whereas I think there’s some slight hint of moral center. The victims are generally drawn sympathetically. The Ripper character goes more and more out of control (kind of like Hyde), and ultimately begins to kill people who are connected to him, and therefore certain to lead the police to him (though we never see that final outcome). Also, his blood lust leads him more into despair than into any discernible excitement. So this is not exactly an “isn’t murder sexy?” scenario.
That’s my take on it. Here’s the description at blockbuster.com, written by someone knowledgeable in this subgenre of Japanese “softcore”:
“Of any filmmaker pushing the boundaries of Nikkatsu’s successful “violent pink” line of softcore pinku eiga films in the mid-’70s, no one did it with more style and less conscience than Yasuharu Hasebe. This film comes off the outstanding Okasu! with another dazzling nightmare of erotic violence. Tamaki Katsura (nominated as Best Actress by the Japanese Academy for her role here) and Yutaka Hayashi star as a young couple whose increasingly kinky sex games lead them to slice and dice a number of young women with a cake-knife, starting a citywide panic. Hasebe strikes the perfect balance between blood and sex, which are intertwined as they rarely are in mainstream European films and almost never in American ones. Unfortunately, his next swing at the genre was the appalling Rape! 25-ji Bokan (1977), a film so unbelievably vicious and perverse that it all but halted Nikkatsu’s production of violent pink for nearly two years.” ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide
Well, frankly, this “erotic” nightmare is less than “dazzling,” but it is more than competently made. Even though Assault! Jack the Ripper is well made and well acted, though, I do not recommend that you seek it out.
Here are a couple of links to background info on the pinku eiga genre of Japanese cinema and its “violent pink” subgenre. (Oh, and need it be said that linking is for information purposes only and does not imply endorsement?):
