Taking place in Victorian-era London, 2023’s Ripper’s Revenge tells the story of Sebastian Stubb (Chris Bell.)

Sebastian Stubb is a journalist, writing stories for one of the many sleazy tabloids that keep the people of London in a state of constant agitation.  Just a few months ago, things were going well for Stubb and his fellow reporters.  Jack the Ripper was terrorizing the city and sending bloody letters to both the police and the newspaper.  Every day, there was a new detail to be reported and a new panic to stoke.  Stubb and his colleagues left London obsessing over the crimes and the motivation of the mysterious Jack the Rippe, to such an extent that Stubb now feels that his reporting probably inspired more murders than it stopped.

Jack the Ripper’s killing spree has come to an apparent end and the Ripper himself has disappeared, though Londoners still continue to speculate about who he could have been.  (In real life, the police rather infamously claimed that an obscure lawyer named Montague Druitt was the murderer but there really wasn’t much evidence for that, beyond the fact that the murders appear to have ended at the same time that Druitt committed suicide.  Personally, I suspect that the assassin was an American con artist named Francis Tumblety, who fled back to America shortly after the final murder was committed.)  Stubb is now struggling financially.  While his girlfriend, Iris (Rachel Warren), walks the streets just as the victims of Jack the Ripper once did, Stubb searches for the next big story.

Then, one day, Stubb gets a letter.  The letter is from someone claiming to be Jack the Ripper.  The writer apologizes for having not written sooner and then tells Stubb that his latest victim can be found in a warehouse.  Though believing the letter to be a hoax, Stubb goes to the warehouse and discovers a dead prostitute.  At the same time, Stubb is himself discovered by the London police and is hauled off to jail.

Now, at this point, I should mention that Ripper’s Revenge is a sequel to a film called Ripper Untold.  That film also featured Chris Bell as Stubb and apparently, it featured him investigating the original Ripper murders.  I point this out because I haven’t seen Ripper Untold, so I don’t know how directly Ripper’s Revenge follows the story from the first film.  It doesn’t really matter, though,  This is a case where you can follow the sequel’s plot without having seen the original.

We know Stubb is not the Ripper but who is?  Because this is a low-budget film, there really aren’t that many suspects.  Inspector Wingate (Carl Wharton) seems to have a nasty puritanical streak.  Junior reporter Lenny (Rafe Bird) seems to be almost too eager to help out Stubb.  And even Iris seems to be really excited about the idea of the murders starting again, if just so Stubb can make more money.  Who is the murderer?  I won’t spoil it, beyond to say that the ending has so many twists that it almost starts to feel like a parody of a surprise ending.

That said, this low-budget and rather talky film is actually surprisingly effective.  Bell, Warren, Wharton, and especially Rafe Bird all give excellent performances and the film really does capture the claustrophobic desperation of living on the fringes of acceptability,  (This is a case where both the low budget and the limited amount of locations really work to the film’s benefit.)  The discussion about whether or not the Ripper would have existed without the press shows that this film has more on its mind than just exploiting the crimes of history’s first celebrity killer.  As I said, the ending is a twisty one and it doesn’t quite make sense but things rarely do when it comes to Jack the Ripper.