A Knife for the Ladies

What if Jack the Ripper escaped and made it to the Wild West? Well, a knife-wielding killer has been slicing his way through the small desert town of Mescal. And while most of the victims have been prostitutes, the first was Travis Mescal, the only son of the town's richest family. The sheriff hasn't been able to solve matters, so the town's leaders bring in an investigator to get the job done. Directed by Larry G. Spangler, who also produced and directed The Life and Times of the Happy Hooker, this is a rare horror Western. It's got a great start and plenty of filler until the end. At least Jack Elam is in it as the sheriff. And Ruth Roman, who lights up The Baby. She's in this, too. The hero detective - played by Jeff Cooper - has a 1970's haircut, which really makes no sense. Neither does this movie, which is unsure if it wants to be horror, proto-slasher, a Western or a giallo. It fails equally at each, providing ony boredom.

City private investigator Jeff Cooper travels to frontier backwater in order to investigate the slasher murders of town matriarch Ruth Roman's son and a gaggle of local prostitutes. Things are complicated by the vigilante murder of a Mexican cowboy and brutish, old-school sheriff Jack Elam. Mildly entertaining drive-in trash, this benefits from the old low-rent sets and ancient costumes that were pretty much a sign of the times in the early seventies. You can practically smell the mothballs, though they (the set-pieces not the mothballs) make this low, low-budget western/horror flick almost look like a million bucks. The weird, very exploitative climax is fun too, as are the presences of Elam and Roman. For a better Jack-the-ripper-goes-west story, watch the Episode of Dead Man's Gun aptly titled "The Ripper".

A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES is a weird mix of a prototype slasher movie and a stable western, shot on a low budget and starring the inimitable Jack Elam as the town sheriff. Elam's very good, one of the best reasons to watch the film, but the rest of it is a bit of a jumbled mess and surprisingly tame given the genre; it feels more like a television movie than anything else. Elam's sheriff and a rival investigate a series of mysterious slayings in a small western town, but the mystery aspects of the story are limited and this takes an age to go anywhere. The ending is mildly effective but the two separate genres never really gel and there are only a few stand-out moments, Elam's tangling with a younger model in a jail cell being one of them.

A bizarre yet watchable cross between a typical oater and a slasher film, KNIFE FOR THE LADIES (or better known as "Jack The Ripper Goes West" on DVD) is actually a fairly entertaining jumble of genres, aided by the one and only Jack "One-Eye" Elam as the town sheriff, a drunken, unwashed, temperamental SOB who loves his rotgut and loves to fight, all of which is exacerbated when a clean-cut private eye comes in from the big city to help the townsfolk stop an unknown murderer bumping off the women. Although the DVD version is obviously edited of some scenes, causing the story to leave gaps as big as the one in Terry-Thomas's smile,the film moves along at a good gallop until the somewhat predictable conclusion.