Hands of the Ripper
For the film's final scenes in St. Paul's Cathedral, permission was requested, and turned down, to film on location. A replica of it was built instead.,Dr. Pritchard (Eric Porter) tells Dysart (Derek Godfrey) that he believes that Anna (Angharad Rees) may be suffering from schizophrenia and that he wants to use Dr. Sigmund Freud's then-new method of psychoanalysis to treat her condition. Later, he insists multiple times that he is sure that he can "cure" Anna. However, Freud believed that psychoses like schizophrenia could not be treated by analysis because the patients' minds were divorced from objective reality and they did not recognize or even acknowledge that they were mentally ill.,Dysart: Damn it, Pritchard, you've got a possessed being in your home, as savage as any wild beast!,For an R rating in the US, the murders of Long Liz and the housemaid were trimmed, notably the second stab wound on the latter.,Featured in Cinemacabre TV Trailers (1993),Agnus Dei (from 'Requiem')
(uncredited)
Written by Giuseppe Verdi
[heard during the climactic 'Whispering Gallery' scene],Not your typical Hammer vehicle starring Eric Porter as a doctor, influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, who wants to study a young 17 year-old girl he knows to be a murderer. Porter thinks by analyzing her past he can find out why people murder and maybe prevent the act of murder in the human race in the process. The film is interesting in its objectives yet is a bit uneven in its execution. Directed by Peter Sasdy, who has obvious talent and directed Taste the Blood of Dracula nd Countess Dracula, the film works very hard at focussing on the relationship of childhood memories with adult behaviour, but at the same time wants to incorporate typical Hammer stuff such as big bosoms busting through stretched corsets and lots of blood and bizarre deaths. Angharad Rees plays the murderous daughter of the Whitechapel killer who as a child saw her mother brutally killed and then was orphaned. She does a good job as do all the actors. My biggest problem is with Porter, not his performance, but his character's motivation. I find it a little difficult to believe that a man supposedly intelligent would be so amoral, for he definitely seems to think that he is doing nothing wrong. The film is not all talk. There are several murders, all fairly brutal in their execution(no pun intended). The most ridiculous of these has to be a woman killed by her pince-nez glasses...but I'll let you decide if murder by pince-nez is realistic or not. There are some wonderful scenes too and the climatic one in St. Pauls is extremely powerful.,