Directors: Albert and Allen Hughes
Starring: Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Robbie Coltrane, Ian Holm.
DVD price: $29.98
Distributor: 20th Century Fox

FROM HELL? To be honest, the film's not quite that impressive. Perhaps we'd be closer calling it FROM CROYDON.

OK, now, let's be honest, no-one here is really expecting Hollywood to produce a faithful adaptation of the seminal 1989 "melodrama in sixteen parts" from comics geniuses Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, are they? We all know that that one's a lost cause. Hell, Alan Moore virtually ignored the film throughout its production.

But everyone is curious to know just how much of a dog's breakfast they made of it. Was it your bog-standard half-baked mutt's feast, a la "classics" like THE PUNISHER? Or did it, by some freak of nature, turn into a particularly dark and sinister breakfast, a breakfast at least hinting of things darker than dog food lurking within it, perhaps eaten by some brooding mutt with ritual scarification who will lift his leg on a Hawksmoor church doorstep before wending his way in apparently random yet strangely significant patterns through London?

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling strangely hungry.

The first steps in the film adaptation really aren't too promising. While the book placed physician and Mason Sir William Gull centre stage, and worked as a kind of combination travelogue and grimoire, with Gull slowly drawing the reader down into his world of blood and (probable) madness, the film focuses on Fred Abberline, the detective most closely associated with the killings. In the book, of course, Abberline is a secondary character, a middle-aged detective. Here, by the magic of cinema, he is transformed into a young, handsome, brilliant detective who is, of course, the only man who can solve the mystery.

Actually, it's not quite as bad as it sounds. For starters, the new, improved Abberline is actually one of the better characters in the film - an opium addict, he gains most of his brilliance through drug-addled visions which fit in rather well with the overall feel of both the film and the book. Secondly, the improved model Abberline gets us Johnny Depp, which is, frankly, always a good thing. Apart from anything else, he's about the only non-English actor in the entire film that can be trusted to hold an accent.

Gull, by contrast, is relegated to a secondary role, as the apparently helpful physician who in fact turns out to be a barking loon, and a secret agent besides. The depth and complexity of the character in the book come through only in hints, such as his half-truncated (and, if you haven't read the book, entirely unintelligible) speech to his fellow Masons at the end of the film. Most of the time, he's an overly helpful cookie-cutter character of the sort seen in a thousand second-rate whodunits - making this one thousand and one.

Irritatingly, not only did the film-makers iron out Gull's complexities (which, admittedly, would have been a hard sell to any audience outside the fairly small comics-and-Crowley market), but they also cast an actor who would have been perfectly capable of doing the longer version justice. Ian Holm is grievously wasted in this role, but he proves, in the few moments where hints of the original Gull show through, that had he been given the opportunity, he could have pulled off the role brilliantly.

Edging Gull's London travelogues and Masonic architecture off the screen, sadly, is the film's alleged "romance", and with it the only truly ghastly performance in the entire thing. I realise that the Hughes brothers needed some hot female flesh to make this - by now - proto-slasher flick appeal to the 18-25 market, but couldn't they at least have chosen someone who could put on a convincing Cockney accent? (Finding someone who could act would probably be asking too much.)

Sadly, no. Instead they chose to stand alongside such greats of the stage and screen as Holm, Ian Richardson (also wasted) and Johnny Depp the noted actress... Heather Graham. Yeah, the one from AUSTIN POWERS 2. On the upside, her accent does at least bring the travelogue element back into the film, as it veers wildly between Australian and American. In point of fact, about the only place she never sounds like she hails from is London.

Graham really can't handle this role, and never even begins to convince. That's not altogether her fault, though - some effort to make her look the part, rather than making her up and dressing her in clean and expensive-looking clothes, might have helped a great deal.

I can't say enough bad things about the performance of FILM HELL - sorry, FROM HELL - when it comes to period authenticity, particularly when it comes to the slums of London. The Hughes brothers were apparently initially attracted to FROM HELL because it was "a ghetto movie". Though that is at best a dubious reading of the comic book, I can only assume that the brothers' idea of a ghetto is a lot more pleasant than mine, at least when it comes to Victoriana.

Even their opening shot is horribly, horribly wrong, as we track down the wide, clean streets of, er, Whitechapel, through which ladies parade with no fear for their safety or their long skirts, towards a pub that might look disreputable to someone used to the LA high life, but which frankly would be described by most Britons as a "friendly, comfortable local". One brief bit of overacting by a couple of alleged London crooks, rather ineffectively threatening our equally ineffectively scared heroine, and we're away.

I'd love to universally pan everything connected with this film's vision of Whitechapel, but sadly I can't. In amidst the floods of "yonder lies der castle of my fadder" style Hollywood history, occasional flashes of strong characterisation arise from the whores who form the main supporting cast. Susan Lynch, in particular, makes for a reasonably convincing ageing whore. Unfortunately, everything else in the movie fights against these occasional flashes of competence:

In fact, "occasional flashes" pretty much sums up the entirety of this movie for anyone who has read the book. Most of the time, the film feels mired in its poor or non-existent research, its unwillingness to either ignore the book totally or actually include the things that made it so famous, and its dodgy scriptwriting and unoriginal plot.

But occasionally, there are flashes. Flashes of convincing acting from the whores; flashes of Ian Holm managing to do more with two lines than many actors could manage with a soliloquy; even flashes of moments from the book that, one fears, may have fallen victim to focus groups, like the repeated shots of Hawksmoor churches or the explanation-free sequence involving the Elephant Man (a significant character in the book).

And then there's the cinematography. Genius cinematographer Peter Deming (long-time collaborator of David Lynch, most recently on MULLHOLLAND DRIVE) is largely held in check by having to deal with such mundane material, but occasionally he gets the chance to give us shots that look like they really do come from Hell. Whether it's London glowering under a blood-red sky, or the bizarre juxtapositions of Abberline's visions, FROM HELL is almost worth seeing for those half-dozen shots alone.

These occasional flashes do not save the film, but you can watch what currently exists and see another film in there somewhere, and that film really is good. It's a pity that it's not the film the Hughes brothers chose to make, but it can still be detected, pulsing in the limp veins of its hapless host, intermittently sending out shocks of power.

Hugh Hancock is an animation director and producer with machinima pioneers Strange Company.

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