Smelling Shoes

FROM HELL

For those of you who know me, you know that I'm not a very good driver. When I'm allowed to actually HAVE a license, I usually do something stupid to get it taken away again. 

Nevertheless, I cling to the notion that I'm not always a bad driver, I simply have bad timing! It just so happens that when I choose to drive 45 mph in front of a school or make U-turns on the expressway there seems to be a cop right there waiting for me: Bad Timing.

And could there be any worse timing than releasing a movie titled "From Hell" on the Hallmark "holiday" of Sweetest Day? That's like releasing Porky's VII on Christmas Eve and waiting for the box office cash to roll in. 

Apparently everyone in the audience was fooled by the title of the movie as well and thought it was going to be about Gummi Bears rescuing a lost rainbow, because I never heard so many shocked gasps of "Oh no!" every time a girl stepped into a dark alley by herself. Did they not know that this was about Jack the Ripper, or were they confused and thought it was about Jack Tripper from Three's Company? more

"From Hell" tells the story of Inspector Aberline (Johnny Depp) the detective assigned to investigate the grotesque murders of several prostitutes in 1888 London by Jack the Ripper. Aberline is blessed with the gift of psychic premonitions (after a nice bout of Opium, that is) of the girls about to be murdered. 

However, all he can see in these dreams are visions of the dead and their
surroundings. In another twist of bad timing, this is London in 1888. It is a dark, gray city where every brick building and cobblestone street looks the same, so it's impossible to decipher which alleyway these murders are about to take place in. All I have to say is thank God that today in the 21st century, our psychics are able to locate crime scenes right down to the exact open, green field with a fence by a tree next to a river. As long as we keep supplying our psychics with opium we should all feel pretty safe.

And what would a film about Jack the Ripper be without a love interest, right? So, Aberline falls for Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), one of the five whores he is supposed to be protecting. These prostitutes are supposed to be struggling for cash to pay off their pimp, which I can understand by looking at the other four, but while Heather Graham may have the acting skills of a Golden Graham, I'm pretty sure that there would be no shortage of men willing to boink her for sixpence covering her weekly kickback. She did however have a problem covering her breasts which were putting as much stress on her shirts as the San Andreas fault exerts on southern California...not that I minded.

I guess that my major problem with "From Hell" is that the whole mystery of Jack the Ripper is just that: It's a mystery and no one knows who the killer was. That's what has made the case so famous and mysterious. When a film attempts to guess at his identity, the mystery is taken away and my interest fades to a dull gray, much like the streets of 1888 London. The only thing that could have regained my interest was if Jack the Ripper appeared in the theater seat behind me and tried to cut my throat. But alas, bad timing prevails again because he's been dead for 100 years and no one could take away my pain of sitting through the rest of this film. 

Click here to read poetry by Rob Schumann. Really.