The back of the VHS box for this movie promises that “A new horror classic is born!” It also states that “Tom Savini, the master of film gore — whose credits include Friday the 13th, Day of the Dead and a cameo role in Creepshow — brings new dimension to the character in this startling version of the Ripper legend.” Keep in mind that Savini used to get down on his knees at conventions and beg forgiveness for this one. He was paid $15,000 for a one day of acting. One would argue that he should have done something — anything — else with his time.

Christopher Lewis, the director of this affair, is the son of actress Loretta Young. He attended USC film school with George Lucas but by the 1980s, he was living in Tulsa, Oklahoma and hosting their afternoon newsmagazine show PM Magazine on KOTV. His wife, Linda, was working in the promotions department and regularly produced and starred in a show called Intermissions with Linda Lewis, which used her face to face interviews with movie stars on their press junkets to promote new films.

The Lewises wanted to stop promoting other peoples’ movies and make their own, which started with their first shot on video effort Blood Cult. It was one of the first shot directly to video movies released into video stores and earned the couple $475,000 in profit. That leads us to their second film, The Ripper.

A student and his teacher, Mr. Harwell, spend most of the movie calling one another about movies. Seriously, I started wondering if this film was about their affair and how no one in 1986 would be able to understand it. But no, it’s really about Harwell teaching a film class about famous killers and coincidentally finding the ring of Jack the Ripper. You remember the ring of Jack the Ripper, his famous ring, right? No? You don’t? Me either.

There’s also plenty of Jazzercise looking classes taught by Harwell’s wife and Whitechapel recreated on the streets of Tulsa. One of the locations, Colonial Antiques in downtown Tulsa, was where the ring buying sequences was shot. The Lewises Mercedes was stolen while these scenes were filmed.

The most amazing thing about this movie is that the writer took to IMDB to dismiss some of the critiques of the film and set straight how much the Lewises changed up his words. Magical.

There are some gruesome effects as the Ripper kills off young women, but otherwise, there’s not much here. Even Savini can’t save this with his mustache twirls, as if he were a yinzer Snidely Whiplash.

I’ve seen plenty of bad movies, but never one quite so bad as The Ripper. Let that sink in and decide if you want to see it for yourself.

Back in the 1980’s, you could shoot horror movies directly on video and they’d still get into video stores. Jeff Hathcock did that with two movies, this one and Streets of Death. He also created Victims! and the Troma film, Fertilize the Blaspheming Bombshell. But today, we’re here to discuss his 1986 slasher film, Night Ripper.

Sure, this movie is packed with sheer Velveeta, but I kind of loved it. It turns out that a guy who ignores his fiancee — who is having sex with her boss anyway — and meets hot models as he does glamour shots for them ends up getting blamed for some murders that are just like Jack the Ripper. He becomes a suspect and also falls in love with one of the girls who gets targeted by the real Night Ripper. Or is that Night Ripper!?

Even better, Larry Thomas, the Soup Nazi, is one of the suspects. And if you are keeping track: Thomas was in Don Edmond’s Terror on Tour — which looks like and stinks like an SOV, but was shot on film. There’s also tons of bad acting, worse line readings, soap opera music cues and incredible dialogue like “This isn’t love! This is two sweaty bodies fucking under flood lamps. And I’m tired of flood lamps!”

I think more movies should have this much surface noise, with actors being recorded probably from the microphone that’s on the camera. It’s also got an awesome climax inside a mannequin factory, making me think that I should have saved this for my upcoming theme week of mannequin movies.

This is really hard to find, so I’m just going to share the whole movie (via You Tube) in the hopes that you watch it and love it as much as I do.

Do you need more SOV Jack the Ripper hijinks? Check out Christopher “Blood Cult” Lewis’s The Ripper starring Tom Savini

So many of the films that I love, I learned about from the zine Cinema Sewer. Generally, if Robin Bougie recommends a film, you know you’re in for something astounding. And if he recommends a film while also warning you off from it, then you’re probably going to get something that scars you for life.

Here’s what he had to say about Things: “My friends, this is the worst movie ever made.

I don’t mean like the way Troma makes bad movies. I’m talking about bad with the best of intentions, like all of the best “bad” movies. You like tormenting yourself with hilariously trashy, moronic, gory, IDIOTIC bad films??THINGS is the fucking KING of bad movies. This is the movie you put on when you have a get together of pals — and just blow them away. Trust me, you have never seen anything like this in your life. It’s absolutely astonishing in how it is able to MENTALLY WRECK anyone who watches it.

You think you’re bad ass? You think you’ve seen the most insane hardcore shit around? You’ll seriously be weeping and sobbing on the floor in a puddle of your own drool half way through THINGS. Try it and see if I’m joking. JUST FUCKING TRY IT AND SEE IF I’M JOKING!!”

Shot on Super 8 and 16mm film in 1989 for around $35,000, Things was the first Canadian shot-on-Super 8 gore movie that was commercially released on VHS. I can only imagine what people thought if they ever picked this up in a video store. We used to challenge our friends to finish Bloodsucking Freaks when we were kids, because that was the goriest blast of strangeness we could get in our hometown. I fear what I would have grown up to become if I had seen Things when I was in my teens.

Wikipedia is ill-prepared to give a synopsis of this film, saying “A husband with a fanatical desire but inability to father children is driven to force his wife to undergo a dangerous experiment. This results in hatching a non-human life form in his wife’s womb, and the birth of a multitude of things.”

It’s kind of about that. There is also a lot of people drunkenly walking around an apartment talking about Aleister Crowley and Salvador Dali, too. There’s a lot of beer drinking and arguing. And then there’s former adult film star Amber Lynn in one of her first mainstream roles, playing a news reporter who has nothing to do with the rest of the film, with stories about George Romero fighting copyright law.

There’s also a sandwich eating scene that is given just as much importance as the rest of the plot.

This is the kind of movie that I wake up at 5 AM to watch by myself so that I don’t have to deal with Becca coming in and saying, “What the fuck is this shit?” What the fuck is this shit, indeed!

Canuxploitation.com said of the film, “Shot for pocket change in the bleak suburban wilds of Scarborough, Ontario, Things is nothing less than a violent filmic assault on its audience, putting viewers through a punishing gauntlet of technical ineptitude so heinous that it defies every basic assumption about what constitutes a horror film.” They also referred to it as “an entirely dehumanizing film event.”

I don’t know if that’s praise or scorn, a fact that seems to sum up most people who have seen this film. We know it’s bad, we hate that we watched it and yet we feel that we must share it with others so that they can experience whatever the fuck we just watched for ourselves.

In no way is this a good movie or one I feel that anyone who isn’t prepared to deal with psychological torture to watch. There are Casio keyboard tones distorted, chopped and screwed while people worry about going to the bathroom or discuss how they wished their brother had been born a midget. It’s like if David Cronenberg got all fucked up on some old weed that you found in your sock drawer and sat down to scream a story at you through a child’s megaphone toy, pausing every once in awhile to flip on different channels on the TV.

I resisted watching this for so long. And now I’m infected. All I can do is spread the contagion. You can grab the Intervision DVD release of this movie at Severin‘s website if you are brave or stupid enough to want to see it.