John Wesford (James Spader) is a doctor who wishes to help his local community in any way he can, and if that means giving up his spare time, or even the time he should be at work, to help the homeless, so be it. He is especially concerned because of the story that has been in the news recently, for some maniac is recreating the murders committed by Jack the Ripper in Victorian London exactly one hundred years before, and if he manages to kill a pregnant prostitute tonight then he will have completed his highly dubious mission. The cops are desperately trying to prevent this final death, and John has been trying to look out for any potential victims, but he is about to have a close call himself...
The title Jack's Back suggested this would be some kind of reincarnation horror where the notorious serial killer would be returning to stalk the streets, hunting down fallen women for his own sick satisfaction, but it wasn't that at all. It did feature a supernatural element, as John was a twin and his bad boy brother Rick (also Spader) has flashes of experiencing intense moments in John's life, as occurs when he wakes up after dreaming a nightmare where he lived the doctor's death. Before we reached that point, we got to know John who was played as not only a little too good to be true, but with this star a shade too smarmy into the bargain, not that he deserved what happened to him.
Was this an amateur detective thriller or a psychic chiller, then? You could see it as both, with either aspect to the plot jostling for attention, and thanks to that not often tried melding of the two Jack's Back picked up a small but impressed cult following, with some of those brought to it thanks to Spader's presence in an eighties movie they were not too familiar with so they took a chance on it, and others because Rowdy Herrington directed a far bigger cult movie with Road House a handful of years later, so they checked this out to see if it contained the same appeal. It wasn’t much of the same mix of action and laughs, intentional or otherwise, however, as it was presented more or less straightforwardly.
Which in truth was a drawback, since this may have had the twists in the right places, and it was absurd enough to entertain those thoughts of trashy amusement, but it simply took itself too seriously for a film with this premise, not one deliberate scene of humour in it and not much that was possible to lampoon affectionately either. The idea of the reawakening of the spirit of Jack the Ripper had been done in a Robert Bloch-penned episode of Star Trek back in the sixties, so they couldn't go down that route, so this Jack was a copycat whose motives were never made clear, he was just your common or garden, lesser spotted movie psycho. With that cliché in place, you had a sense of going through the motions somewhat.
That in spite of the filmmakers, who had been behind the scenes talents who thought they had a pretty decent idea for their own film, obviously not taking their production lightly. But was that the problem? After all, it didn’t exactly need to be a laff riot to be a suspenseful thriller, yet there was still something missing to give it that spark of madness it genuinely needed to take off and fly. There was nothing wrong with the cast, who contained enough of the questioning frame of mind for the audience to be wondering if they were the killer and Rick was barking up the right tree for a change, and Robert Picardo had a nice reading of the possibly dodgy psychiatrist, plus Cynthia Gibb continued her run of offering generic female roles in eighties movies a little more zing than they would have had a lesser actress been playing John's work colleague and potential love interest. So there was good stuff here, it was only the feeling more could have been made of it that prevented Jack's Back from earning its underrated gem status that its fans bestowed upon it. Music by Danny Di Paola.
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