Prime Video has thrown out the fascinating made-for-TV oddity Terror At London Bridge, starring David Hasselhoff and, er, Jack the Ripper. As lovely as the Golden Age of TV is (trademark 2005, the year The Wire came out), part of me misses an era when television didn’t look as polished. A time when Hollywood stars ... Terror At London Bridge | David Hasselhoff versus Jack the Ripper thriller now on Prime Video
Prime Video has thrown out the fascinating made-for-TV oddity Terror At London Bridge, starring David Hasselhoff and, er, Jack the Ripper.
As lovely as the Golden Age of TV is (trademark 2005, the year The Wire came out), part of me misses an era when television didn’t look as polished. A time when Hollywood stars often shunned the small screen as being somehow beneath them, and a period when networks threw out made-for-the-tube movies with really, really odd premises.
This brings us to Terror At London Bridge (alternate title: Arizona Ripper), which has one of the most brilliantly batty concepts in 80s TV. It’s London, 1888. A cloaked killer, dubbed Jack the Ripper by the papers, is terrorising women across Whitechapel. But! What history doesn’t record is that, one dark autumn night, detectives cornered the murderer on London Bridge, then shot him repeatedly with their revolvers (it turns out that British cops of the time were all heavily armed…).
Mortally wounded, Jack stumbled into the Thames, dislodging a large stone from the top of the bridge in the process. Almost a century later (in 1971, to be exact) the original London Bridge was purchased by the Americans, and moved stone by stone to Arizona, where it still sits in the desert as an odd tourist attraction in Lake Havasu City. According to Terror At London Bridge, the bit of masonry knocked into the Thames by the Ripper is later recovered, and is restored to the original structure in a grand unveiling ceremony.
Not long after, a woman happens to be walking over the bridge one night, and also happens to have a cut on her finger. A drop of her blood makes contact with the very same stone the Ripper touched almost 100 years earlier and – with a flash of light and stage smoke – the Victorian killer returns from the grave, ready to engage in a new campaign of terror among the bridge’s unsuspecting visitors.
Luckily for the people of Nevada, David Hasselhoff’s taking a break from his vehicular antics in Knight Rider (which was still ongoing when Terror At London Bridge first aired in 1985). Hasselhoff plays detective Don Gregory here, a Chicago cop sent off to a less hectic beat in the middle of nowhere after a grim shooting incident a while earlier (Gregory’s back story isn’t unlike Murtaugh’s in Richard Donner’s 1987 thriller, Lethal Weapon, thinking about it).
As the body of one victim is found floating in a river, Gregory begins to theorise that the Ripper might somehow be the culprit – an idea that understandably provokes a fair amount of scorn. At least until the murderer starts taunting the local press with flamboyantly confessional letter.
The film makes no secret of the killer’s identity, either, with Paul Rossilli playing the Ripper – a Victorian who talks like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula and struggles to adapt to an 80s era of big hair and even bigger shoulder pads.
Unfortunately, the film’s TV underpinnings means that Terror At London Bridge never quite matches the brilliance of its premise. The script, by sci-fi writer William F Nolan, spends more time on a romance subplot than thrills, probably because there was only so much death, gore and mayhem you could put on network television at the time. Director EW Swackheimer, veteran of such shows as M*A*S*H and Murder She Wrote, isn’t necessarily an expert at crafting suspense, either, though he does give that stage smoke-filled opening in 1880s London a bit of shadowy atmosphere.
Read more: The Time Guardian | One of the weirdest sci-fi movies of the 1980s has appeared on Prime Video UK
Among the highlights, though, are Adrienne Barbeau as a librarian who falls for this charming British man in his waistcoat and cravat (“I love your English accent!” she coos). Randall Mantooth, who plays Hasselhoff’s sidekick, deserves a mention simply because of his wonderful name. There’s also a theme tune by the great Lalo Schifrin, and of course Hasselhoff himself, bringing all his 80s machismo to Detective Don. Various actors have had the chance to face the Ripper in film and TV over the years; few have had the opportunity to engage in a punch-up with him in an Arizona barroom, as Hasselhoff does here.
Suggested product
Issue #59 (Handmade Special): Magazine, 'Bulk' 4K UHD Blu-Ray + Ben Wheatley Signed Zine
£39.99
Terror At London Bridge’s premise has so much goofy potential that I’d normally say it’s ripe for some sort of modern remake. But then again, a 21st century TV version of Terror At London Bridge would probably spend an entire season establishing Detective Don’s traumatic experiences in the Chicago Police Department, before spending the second season detailing exactly how London Bridge was transported over the Atlantic, so perhaps it’s better if we make do with the 1980s relic we already have.
Terror At London Bridge is streaming now on Prime Video if you fancy it.
