USA, 1985
Review: JA Kerswell
A light yet entertaining mix of supernatural slasher-lite hokum. David Hasselhoff fights a resurrected Jack the Ripper in Arizona during the era of mullets and pebbledash jeans. How Old Jack perceives the pastel fashions and deelyboppers of 1985 is underexplored in this made-for-TV movie, but it certainly makes for an enjoyable rainy Sunday afternoon film.
Don (Hasselhoff) has moved from being a big-city Chicago cop to what he hopes will be a quieter life in Lake Havasu, Arizona, a town best known for housing the original London Bridge that was moved across the Atlantic and reassembled brick-by-brick in 1968. Don’s arrival coincides with the placement of a missing brick from the bridge that was recently found at the bottom of the Thames. The authorities are planning a big ceremony to celebrate, with the Mayor of London attending (played by someone who appeared in THE BENNY HILL SHOW, which seems strangely fitting).
However, the night before the celebration, Alice, a woman presumably obsessed with Victorian bricks (Barbara Bingham from FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)), tells her husband she must have an after-hours look at the monument and sends him back to his hotel. While marveling at the sight, she cuts her hand and bleeds slightly on the recently placed stone, then is surprised to see a man in a hat and cape emerge from dry ice, chase her, and slit her throat. To be fair, she didn’t realize that in 1888, police shot Jack the Ripper during a pea-souper in old London Town on the very same bridge in its original spot (an event that, of course, didn’t happen in real life). Handsome Jack fell into the river, followed by a dislodged stone. Alice understandably didn’t see that coming on her bingo card that day.
While authorities initially dismiss her distraught husband, Alice’s body is found floating downstream by Angie (Kramer), who operates a tourist and fishing boat. Since Lake Havasu is presumably twinned with Amity Island, Mayor Anson Whitfield (Smith) refuses to shut down the faux British village resort next to the bridge, fearing it will scare tourists away, and dismisses Don’s theories that the killer could still be around—which might be because he’s the only cop I’ve ever seen who only ever wears a beige windbreaker and tight blue jeans—saying it was simply a passing transient, which must be cold comfort to the dead woman’s husband. Don protests to his boss, Peter (genre legend Gulager), that he thinks there’s more to it, as he’s not only a cop but a true crime buff, also (!). He becomes especially intrigued when he learns that tests from the murder scene show traces of a hundred-year-old fabric and blood. Despite his conviction that something is amiss, Don also finds time to start a fledgling romance with Angie.
To complicate matters, two eccentric British men with posh accents arrive at the resort, but which one is the resurrected Jack the Ripper?
TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE isn’t quite as campy as one might expect, although it definitely has its moments. Like the scene where a nosy reporter (Bloom) tells her dictaphone: “I can feel the vibrations of death here,” before being quickly offed by the killer (and her white shoes covered in what looks like ketchup). Everyone takes the proceedings with an admirably straight face, and the film is full of likeable performances from familiar faces. Even when Hasslehoff has to convince people that Jack the Ripper has returned from the dead, he deadpans with the studied intensity he had before he developed a knack for irony later in his career. Perhaps as a nod to the facade of Britishness of the resort—apparently the second most visited tourist attraction in Arizona after the Grand Canyon—someone from New Jersey plays the Ripper, and his foil is played by an actor from Staten Island (presumably modeled on Van Helsing, though it’s never explained how he knows what’s going on). Rossilli and Fox-Brenton, respectively, give wonderfully inauthentic aristocratic British accents (like Dick Van Dyke went to finishing school). Fox-Brenton is especially hammy and seems to relish his chance to be a theatrical character frothing at the mouth. His best line comes when he speaks to a rather underused Barbeau (who plays the town’s love-hunting librarian) and tries to woo her in the Chamber of Horrors with the line: “Have you ever considered the concept of good and evil?” (A pickup line that works for him in case you want to try it).
Admittedly, TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE leans more toward MURDER SHE WROTE than FRIDAY THE 13TH. The Ripper’s outfit and hat, which are often silhouetted, sometimes give the film a vague sense of the Giallo genre, probably unintentionally. Much of the suspense is undermined by a slow-moving romance subplot and soap opera-like theatrics—though it briefly creates a sense of dread in a scene where The Ripper corners Angie in the catering freezer, surrounded by hanging animal carcasses, and shows her one of his dead victims. Given its format, the violence is quite muted, aside from an early throat-slitting scene (added for its video release and promoted as the unseen extra “Red Footage”).
Director E.W. Swackhamer had a long career on TV and directed the superlative Valerie Harper suspenser NIGHT TERROR (1977). TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE first aired in the US under the rather dull title BRIDGE ACROSS TIME. Hasselhoff was nearing the end of his popular KNIGHT RIDER TV series, which finished the following year in 1986. One of the few reviews of the film was by David Friedman in the Philadelphia News, who called it “the most inane, inspid - make that truly idiotic - TV movie I’ve seen since taking this job.” He pithily noted, “In the acting department, David Hasselhoff has mastered the art of looking comfortable with his shirt unbuttoned down to his navel.” Other newspapers noted—actually called it a direct rip-off—of the movie TIME AFTER TIME (1979), where H.G. Wells chased Jack the Ripper with his time machine. The film was later released on video and rereleased to screens under its more recognisable title.
There must have been something in the water in 1985, as that year also saw the straight-to-video atrocity THE RIPPER (briefly starring Tom Savini). While that film increased the gore, TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE remains a slightly more entertaining viewing experience.
BODY COUNT 5:
Female 4 / Male 1
TERROR AT LONDON BRIDGE (1985) (Trailer)
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