From Hell

Upon reflection, it may have been an unwise choice to see a movie about disemboweled prostitutes with my mom.  I mean, she's cool.  But dude.  It's my mom.

In addition, we saw it in one of those theatre/restaurants.  Apparently, my brain can differentiate between movie gore and real gore.  I had no trouble chomping on my BBQ chicken sandwich while some guy on screen held up a human heart.

Some people apparently have said there's a lot of gore.  I didn't think there was all that much by today's standards.  Most of the gore was shown for only a split second.  Other than that, the gore was mostly implied, by the reactions of the weak-stomached police officers.  There was some discussion about how bad it was.   And clinical discussions with doctors.  I guess there were a couple of graphic portrayals during some dream sequences.

From what little I know of the Jack the Ripper story, this movie used many of the facts.  I don't know whether or not the prostitutes who were murdered were affiliated with each other, as portrayed in the movie.

Depp's character is a little similar to the one he played in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.  He's intelligent and actually looks at the evidence, instead of jumping to conclusions and trying to find facts to fit the preconception.

Early in the movie they say that Depp has premonitions.  <sigh> I could have lived without that in this movie that otherwise didn't have anything supernatural.  I don't think it was necessary for the story.  In fact, I think it detracted a little.

I did find Depp's drug-induced dream sequences generally annoying.  First, they weren't consistent with each other.  If there was a some sort of logic to the changes, I couldn't see it.  They almost seemed to be excuses to play with strange camera angles and some processing methods.

Also, while everyone did a good job of acting, Depp didn't seem to me to portray any of the symptoms of a drug addict.  It just seemed to get left out.  Though another character correctly guesses about it, anyway.  Again, I don't think it was really integral to the story, so I wish they had left it out.

There was also some conspiracy theory stuff at the end that seemed to me to come out of nowhere.

It was sort of mixed up between murder mystery and horror/thriller.  I think that lack of focus blunted the ending.  On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Rental.

Back to movies

Please email comments, typos, errors, dead links, and any suggestions to webmaster@mightydrake.com. (Privacy statement)
Copyright © 1997-2007 Mighty Drake, Inc. All rights reserved.
Last modified: June 14, 2004

Best viewed with:	Hosted by:	Composed with:	In association  with:	Fight Spam
Opera or Mozilla or Explorer or Netscape	Site 5	FrontPage	Amazon.com	Spamcop.net &  Popfile & Greylisting