A Knife for the Ladies (1974)

You won't be disappointed!

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

A Masterpiece!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

A KNIFE FOR THE LADIES is a weird mix of a prototype slasher movie and a stable western, shot on a low budget and starring the inimitable Jack Elam as the town sheriff. Elam's very good, one of the best reasons to watch the film, but the rest of it is a bit of a jumbled mess and surprisingly tame given the genre; it feels more like a television movie than anything else. Elam's sheriff and a rival investigate a series of mysterious slayings in a small western town, but the mystery aspects of the story are limited and this takes an age to go anywhere. The ending is mildly effective but the two separate genres never really gel and there are only a few stand-out moments, Elam's tangling with a younger model in a jail cell being one of them.

City private investigator Jeff Cooper travels to frontier backwater in order to investigate the slasher murders of town matriarch Ruth Roman's son and a gaggle of local prostitutes. Things are complicated by the vigilante murder of a Mexican cowboy and brutish, old-school sheriff Jack Elam.Mildly entertaining drive-in trash, this benefits from the old low-rent sets and ancient costumes that were pretty much a sign of the times in the early seventies. You can practically smell the mothballs, though they (the set-pieces not the mothballs) make this low, low-budget western/horror flick almost look like a million bucks. The weird, very exploitative climax is fun too, as are the presences of Elam and Roman.For a better Jack-the-ripper-goes-west story, watch the Episode of Dead Man's Gun aptly titled "The Ripper".

Does this movie wanna be a western, giallo, comedy, mystery, or what? This movie fails in every genre. If it's trying to be a western, it fails entirely because the detective's 70s hairstyle, clothes, and mannerisms will completely jar viewers out of the western setting. If it's trying to be a giallo, it failed because most of the movie is nonsensical filler that distracts from the killings. If it was trying to be comedy, I didn't find anything intentionally funny, even by 70s standards. If it's trying to be a mystery, it fails because the movie gets so boring by the halfway mark that I fell asleep. I woke up exactly when the killer was revealed, right at the end. When the killer was revealed, I thought, "This movie is still on?" because by that point I had lost so much interest in the movie I decided to go to bed rather than waste time rewatching scenes I fell asleep during. In fact, I turned it off before the credits rolled.Boring, boring, boring, even by 70s standards. Boring characters where I didn't care who lived and who died. A western setting that is painfully obvious it's a movie set. And decided lack of tension or suspense in a movie that touts itself as a murder mystery. All in all, if you wanna fall asleep, put this crap on. If you wanna watch something even the tiniest bit memorable, don't bother with this.

A bizarre yet watchable cross between a typical oater and a slasher film, KNIFE FOR THE LADIES (or better known as "Jack The Ripper Goes West" on DVD) is actually a fairly entertaining jumble of genres, aided by the one and only Jack "One-Eye" Elam as the town sheriff, a drunken, unwashed, temperamental SOB who loves his rotgut and loves to fight, all of which is exacerbated when a clean-cut private eye comes in from the big city to help the townsfolk stop an unknown murderer bumping off the women. Although the DVD version is obviously edited of some scenes, causing the story to leave gaps as big as the one in Terry-Thomas's smile,the film moves along at a good gallop until the somewhat predictable conclusion.