This film came as a real pleasant surprise to me. After seeing the rather poor quality stills displayed on the rear of the DVD cover, I suspected that I was about to spend an hour and a half in the company of a film that had been severely beaten with the ugly stick. I was not hopeful. Clearly a production of very limited funds, Eric Anderson's 'I Am The Ripper' easily comes out as one of the best D.I.Y action/horror movies I have seen in a long time with bone crunching fight scenes mixed with bloody violence made all the more effective by some highly accomplished rapido editing.
We start our story on any typical Friday night as a group of average guys and gals gather to party the night away with inane chatter about "who would win in a straight fight between an Alien and a Predator", very topical! This goofy bunch of layabouts fritter away the evening looking at comic books, talking about girls and fighting death.....oh did I I not mention that death rudely crashes the party and starts to slaughter every one in sight? Well you know now, and so our Halloween costumed bringer of destruction carves a swath of carnage through the group as he chops of the head of a cute chinese girl, impales a few more with hidden 'sleeve' knives before the group decide it might be a good ides to exit stage left before they too become victims. As the mayhem gets increasingly more brutal, death faces down his last victim, Peter, who surprisingly manages to land a few mighty blows to his bony body and earns the respect of the Reaper who gives him 24 hours to prepare for their next meeting where death will tear Peter a new bung hole.

OK, this is definitely not the French equivalent of 'Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey'. There are no games of twister or battleships to decide the victor, instead we have kicks to the face that will make your jaw throb just watching and a ballistic ballet which see's 'Matrix' style wall running and ridiculously fast editing that will make your head spin. The visuals often have the same impact as a severe migraine as they cut sharply from slow motion to blurring pirouette pans which gives the viewer very little time to catch a breath during the more intense battles but you can't argue with the visual flair that has been so carefully built thanks to these's effective camera techniques. As another added bonus to this already highly praised movie, the dizzying action is accompanied by some seriously cool heavy metal music which forces it's way into your head and jangles with your adrenal gland.
Death here is represented in a manner which reminds me of the main character in the Lucas Arts 'Grim Fandango' computer game. A bloke dressed in a long cloak with a cheap skeleton mask tickled my funny bone right up to the moment he started to slice his way through our party goers. This is serious stuff even if our group of drop out teens are made up of a likable group of idiots who, when confronted with the trappings of a room that never ends, walk out and back in again about 5 times before commenting "Something's not right here", really, I hadn't noticed.

With all this goodness comes a strange and annoying down side to what is otherwise an excellent example of an over the top action/violence movie. Low budget cinema thrives thanks to the creative use of resources that comes to hand, but I fail to believe that not a single stage light was available to use on set to enhance the quality of the image. Instead the film seems to be lit entirely from natural sources and given that the film plays out exclusively at night, that means wall, ceiling and street lights drenching everything in an oppressive orange hue which makes the image very grainy and disturbs the colour balance to the point that the film looks like it's shot in monochrome. This might be a strategy to give the movie a tyrannicaltone, but for me, it just quashes the ocular panache.