Whether you were a member of royalty, or some surgeon who needed a little part-time practice on the London trollops, is beside the point. You've been responsible for a steak and kidney pie full of AWFUL movies. Case in point – Ripper 2: Letters from Within. Based so loosely on your legend that enfeebled grandmothers could break the connection, this virtual reality retardation gets so lost in its logistics that it can't decide where it wants to go once it starts. Maybe it's all a dream. Perhaps it's all happening in the main characters head. Could be some manner of Matrix like monkeyshines, except everything here is so hokey that any link to the Wachowskis would be bogus. Call it the Faketrix, or point out its place in the ever-growing canon of needless sequels to uninspired originals. But let's get one thing straight: it's all your fault Jack, and we, the film fanbase, will find a way to make you pay.

The DVD:
If you are familiar with the first Ripper film, then bully for you. You probably know that it's about some kid who thinks she's Jack the Ripper's direct descendant. Turns out she is. Bodies pile up. Odd, unexplainable twist occurs at the end. Blood flows. Direct to DVD dollars are spent. Hurray.

In this stupid redux, our heroine, the spunky, funked up Molly Keller is in a mental institution, pulling that hoary old clichéd 'I'm a cool psycho' shtick for the head doctor. Seems Molly's not responding to therapy – she still thinks she's Jack – and the medico wants to try an experimental approach to treatment. Naturally, such non-FDA approved brain blasting can only be done in Prague. So before we know it, we are off to the Eastern Bloc to meet Dr. Samuel Wiesser, who has converted an old castle into a state of the art virtual reality center. Figures.

Seems this almost mad scientist has a theory – if he can get into the mentally disturbed mind and flush out the freakiness, his patients will no longer have the desire to dismember. After a little minor cranial surgery, Molly is introduced to the alternate universe of her own mind...and it's not a happy place. It looks like White Chapel on a really bad day. Anyway, we meet up with the other test subjects at the facility, a rag tag group of archetypes differentiated by their disorders, not their personalities. There's the Goth chick that likes to hurt herself, the hood rat who's into gang banging, a pretty pyromaniac and an obnoxious sexual pervert (as if there is any other kind). There is also a permanently pissed-off girl with, you guessed it, anger management issues and a studly loverboy dreamboat for our heroine, who is too uninteresting to have a specific malady.

Well, wouldn't you know it, Dr. Wiesser is a quack, experimenting on these kids for his own warped goals, and that hooded, monk-like maniac from the first film is back, walking around in slow motion and offing the troubled teens in overcranked camera style. Realities are twisted. There's a very unsexy scene at a naughty nightclub that goes on for 10 excruciating minutes, and the ending was apparently manufactured out of bird feces and spit. Nothing makes a lick of sense, and if it did, it still wouldn't matter. Ripper 2 would still be boring as Beowulf in old English, and twice as trying.

Let's get the title-based buffoonery out of our collective system, shall we. Yes, Ripper 2 is a Ripper-off. It's as pleasant as the aroma after someone has Ripper-ed the crackers. It's Ripper-diculous and Ripper-snortingly bad. There may be Letters from Within here, but they seem more like leftovers from a screenwriters wastebasket, fan mail from some incredibly exasperating flounders. In case you've missed the gist of this dis, Ripper 2 blows monkeys. Dead, decaying monkeys. Monkeys baking in the boiling Bermuda sun, making their own gravy as the flesh turns extra crispy. While it's quite conceivable that individuals who liked the first film will cotton to this claptrap, anyone with a few remaining gray cells in their skull will hopefully recognize the reek coming off of this very bad boy and avoid it like a J-Lo covers album.

This is a difficult, if not impossible film to figure out, and we're not just talking about plot points here. Indeed, any discussion of narrative would be moot, since there basically is no story. Oh sure, we have so-called characters, and a proposed action arc with a crazy killer stalking his victims, but frankly, every Friday the 13th is The Unbearable Lightness of Being compared to the incoherent mess. Jason Voorhees had a history. Jason Voorhees had panache. Hell, Jason Voorhees had more personality than 90% of the cast. And besides, Big J knew how to carve teen. Blood sprayed, entrails fell to the ground with sickening thuds – it was all good. But Ripper 2 wants to hide its horror away, to keep the deaths as indiscernible as possible. The surveillance video from an abandoned 7-11 has more mise-en-scene, and visiting your Great Aunt in a nursing home is more horrifying. When we can't tell if a character is dead, let alone HOW they died, we are definitely in the hands of horror hacks.

Part of the reason why we gravitate toward these types of fright flicks is the promise of gore. The lure of grue. The insatiable desire to see actors bleed in interesting and novel ways. And at first, it looks like Ripper 2 is going to deliver. As we travel back in time to the squalid streets of London, we witness a particularly brutal eye gouging. Naturally, this gives us pause, and prepares us for more juicy goodness to come. Unfortunately, once you've seen the claret-caked optics, we're done with the dross. The rest of the ravaging is done off screen, with an impaling, a decapitation and a hand-etchomy all hinted at, but never really shown. Our hooded hacker even chops up a few people with his patented swordete – kind of a combination saber and machete. But instead of clots and carnage, we get more bad editing and awful mood lighting. Ripper 2 isn't about explicit violence. It probably figures that what we DON'T see fires our imagination. WRONG! It just makes us mad we wasted our valuable leisure time watching this dung.

Indeed, don't get the wrong impression. Ripper 2 is not substituting suspense for slaughter, not taking advantage of its Slavic setting to put the creep back in Creepshow. No, this is a movie that is in love with the notion of messing with reality, of playing a back and forth game of 'realm of existence' roulette until we just stop caring where we are in connection to the character, the storyline and the bathroom. Indeed, the entire VR element of the film plays like a plot point life preserver. Whenever the illiterate scriptwriters get their characters in a tight or utterly illogical jam, out comes the lame CGI effects and "BINGO" - we are smack dab in another stupid, implausible setting. Used more to save the cinematic than character asses, this bi-location lunacy becomes downright tedious after a while, appearing at random and without much scientific certainty. By the end, when Molly gives us a goofy, pseudo-sinister look and says that "none of this happened", we halfway hope she is telling the truth. If the events in the film never occurred, then we didn't really witness them. And as a result, we can convince ourselves that we have the 83 minutes of our life back that Ripper 2 stole. See? It makes sense in the Ripper's world. Sadly, it seems we need Dr. Stephen Hawking and a protractor to actually figure this film out.

This is not an actor's film. This is not a director's film, though Lord knows why it took TWO people to helm this hooey. Perhaps it took one to rip off the herky-jerky spook style of the modern versions of House on Haunted Hill/ 13 Ghosts and the other to drool incessantly. This is not an exercise in controlled dread or a weird, hot-wired workout. Instead, it's a dull, derivative sequel selling its horrors by rote and tricking out its terrible plotting with pathetic implausibilities. As the final frenzy is misfiring all over the screen, and conclusions are coming at us like the portly to a sundae bar, we wish everyone involved in this dreck would just shut up and die already.

There is nothing original or exceptional about the premise, and had it simply delivered some simple slasher fun, all would be forgive...well, SORT OF forgiven. But this is a movie mired by its own self-importance; a film that thinks it's a classic puzzle with a shocking, unsuspected ending. But since we can't figure out what's happening at the beginning, and could care less about the events of the middle, the finale can't be anything other than a flaccid fart of a failure. Indeed, the Ripper 2 becomes a colossal waste of space, a movie that has nothing to offer and a very pedestrian way of proving it. You'd be better off doing exploratory surgery on your friends, or downloading porn, than watching this perfunctory pig's garbage.

The Video:
For some reason, Velocity Home Entertainment has decided to release Ripper 2 in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. The unimpressive image is overly dark, riddled with grain, and lacking even the basic elements of cinematic substance. The colors are muted, and the contrasts are cranked back so as to render the print rather indistinct. While the letterboxing preserves whatever composition and framing the dueling directors can create, this is a very dull, rather derivative visual presentation.

The Audio:
Ripper 2 does something that is shameless in the horror genre. In place of genuine scares, it cranks up the volume on the 'Alien attack' sounding shocks, hoping that we jump out of our chairs from the pure aural affront of the noise. Unfortunately, it's not spooky – it's just irritating. So as we turn down the volume to tolerate the sonic booms, we miss most of the dialogue in the process. Not that it matters, really. The characters don't have much to say. The rollercoaster reality of the Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo means that you either have to sacrifice your comprehension, or your hearing, while watching this film.

The Extras:
In the sole saving grace of this DVD release, we have NO bonus features to contend with. No high-minded commentary expressing how amazing and wonderful the film is. No behind the scenes shilling arguing that Ripper 2 is some manner of lost classic. No actor biographies or filmographies, no trailers or galleries. To the consumer, this may seem like a swindle. But to the critic, it's a godsend.

Final Thoughts:
So you see, Jack, it really is all your fault...what? What do you mean, you don't understand? Ripper 2 is based on your story and...oh, oh, okay. You've SEEN this junk and don't recognize the connection to your hooker hacking days? Well...OK... You know what, you're right. Perhaps it's wrong to blame you for this cinematic atrocity. Better to name names, to point the branding finger of shame on those who've really wronged us. Let them step up and take the blame. So a pox on you director Lloyd Simandl and Jonas Quastel. A double pox on Quastel for being involved in the script, along with equally cursed co-conspirators John Sheppard and "additional screenplay" scribe (whatever the HELL that means) Pat Bermel. As for the cast? Well, you've suffered enough. You've gutted your career and guaranteed that, if you ever make it big, you have at least one shoddy skeleton in the celluloid closet that you hope stays buried. And as for you, Mr. Ripper, sorry about all the slander. We realize now that you were just an insane, perverted serial killer with a predilection toward tarts. You couldn't be responsible for something this horrible. It takes a truly devious mind to come up with something as shiftless as Ripper 2: Letters from Within.

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