DO we really need another Jack The Ripper movie? Is this just a Jack The Rip-Off or a ripping good, midnight re-telling of one of the greatest unsolved serial murder mysteries?

From Hell lies somewhere between the two: a very English murder trail filmed by an international cast under American directors in a Prague that doubles impressively- grimly for Whitechapel in London's gloomy East End.

The Hughes Brothers - yet more film-making siblings in the age of the Coens, Wachowskis and Farrellys - have established their calling card for the dark and gothic, the violent and the street-tough in Dead Presidents and Menace II Society and here that skill to chill is transplanted proficiently to the dangerous, fog-shrouded, streets of Victorian England.

Drawing on the pages of Alan Moore's comic (or graphic novel, to give its proper title), their conspiracy yarn tosses every theory in the air to establish whodunit, much like Oliver Stone's JFK. Was it the Masons? The royal physician? The syphilitic prince? Or Colonel Mustard?

As the prostitute body count mounts, gruesome gore makes way for Hitchcockian shadow, but there is no suspense or surprise because the story is so well known. It is like the Freddy Krueger or Scream movies: another knifing is always around the corner.

What matters is what comes between, like wondering why the Hughes Bros felt it necessary to cast Austin Powers' American superbabe Heather Graham as wan Mary Kelly, a London Irish lady of the night, recruited from the Dick Van Dyke London Language School.

Or seeing how Johnny Depp shapes up in yet another outsider role, this time effecting a wasted Keith Richards accent as Fred Abberline, the maverick police inspector with a penchant for absinthe, an addiction to laudanum and a sleepy hollowness to follow on from Sleepy Hollow. This is another performance from the Depp end of painful human experience, and his fop cop is the best reason for frequenting this particular Hell.

The Hughes Brothers find room for whydunit as much as whodunit, the more the movie progresses from slasher horror to a psychological study of the prevailing beliefs of the day in matters of sex and class.

Yet From Hell never reaches the highs and lows of heaven and hell. Instead it settles for being a Jack of all trades, master of none, an all right Jack rather than a newly- revelatory addition to the Ripper files.

Updated: 10:10 Friday, February 08, 2002