"From Hell," the latest Hollywood take on Jack the Ripper, begins with Johnny Depp, playing police inspector Fred Abberline, smoking in an opium den. What happens during the next two hours is probably best understood as a delirious opium dream. Overripe melodrama meshes with paranoid fantasies, Grand Guignol horrors and sentimental bathos in so loony a manner as to turn this tale of savage human brutality into unintended comedy.

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