Review: Jack's Back (1988)

It’s unexpected to work your way back through the filmography of a journeyman director and start to uncover the signs of auteurism, but such is the case when you look close enough at some directors. Rowdy Herrington is best known for directing Road House, the 1980s action classic that has finally transcended its “so bad it’s good label” label to take its rightful place in the 80s pantheon of action cinema. But Herrington made several other movies throughout the 80s and 90s, including Striking Distance (1993), which stars Bruce Willis as an alcoholic Pittsburgh boat cop, and the 1988 serial killer thriller Jack’s Back.

Comparing Striking Distance and Jack’s Back (which was his debut feature) to Road House reveals that the action classic’s calibrated artistic approach is no accident. For a genre director of low-brow affairs, Herrington nonetheless has thematic and visual trademarks and a particular artistic sensibility, especially with how he frames scenes of violence or sex within his films. He’s particularly clued into the act of watching, examining the voyeurism inherent in cinema itself. Herrington’s movies are trashy, but he’s always careful to frame the moral implications of the act of watching in his movies. For instance, think of how Patrick Swayze’s Dalton is careful to never leer at the many women of Road House, or how Striking Distance hinges on the point-of-view of an unseen killer in black gloves. (Herrington certainly likes his giallo references.) This is perhaps never more clear than in Jack’s Back, a movie entirely about the burden of being witness to something horrible and the moral weight of voyeurism.

In a sense, Jack’s Black plays like De Palma-lite. The movie revolves around a serial killer committing copycat killings of Jack the Ripper in Los Angeles. With the sort of narrative economy rarely found in contemporary cinema, Jack’s Back opens with a television newscast laying out the facts of the killings and the terror gripping Los Angeles. We then follow two twin brothers, both played by James Spader, who get caught up in the murder spree.

The first, John, is a doctor who works with the disenfranchised across the city. He happens to become a witness to one of the murders and ends up targeted and killed as a result. The police and news think that John was the killer and that he committed suicide out of guilt—they did say that Jack the Ripper was likely a doctor himself, so it fits the bill, they think. Then the movie switches to follow Rick, John’s identical twin, a ne'er do well who knows that John wasn’t the killer. Why? Because he has visions of his brother’s killing, seen through his brother’s eyes (nods to Eyes of Laura Mars, perhaps). With the help of Christine (Cynthia Gibb), a nurse who was friendly with John, Rick seeks to catch the killer and clear his brother’s name.

For viewers who aren’t interested in unpacking Rowdy Herrington’s artistic approach, Jack’s Back functions primarily as a showcase for James Spader, who does impressive work as the two brothers. As John, he’s soft-spoken and down-to-earth. In the role, we understand the sensitive charisma and romanticism that made Spader an appealing leading man in the 80s through the 90s. As Rick, Spader is mysterious and angry. In the performance, we can see how easily Spader’s soft-spoken manner can be read by the viewer as him bottling up his more dangerous impulses. We can witness the violence and dangerous sexuality that bubbles beneath his pretty boy exterior, the kind of energies that would be unleashed in later films by Steven Soderbergh and David Cronenberg.

As a thriller, Jack’s Back moves with a clear structure and pacing. It doesn’t retread narrative ground, instead relying on exposition and escalating set-pieces to convey the necessary information to the viewer and propel the movie to its violent climax. There are ludicrous moments throughout, but no more than you’d find in any film as influenced by giallo as this one. It’s a fun 97 minutes that could only have been made in its specific time and place—not only because it takes place 100 years after the Jack the Ripper killings, but because it features the sort of high-concept genre storytelling that the 1980s was so rife with.

Furthermore, for viewers who are curious about Herrington’s work outside of Road House, the movie becomes a demonstration of his talent for scene construction and his interest in themes of voyeurism and morality. Rick’s many visions in the film become a kind of litmus test for the character. If he does nothing to respond to the visions, he’s no more than a passive observer of violence in the world around him, like a person watching reports of killings on the evening news. But if he rises to the occasion and seeks to clear his brother’s name, he can show that the visions were moral motivation. In a way, Herrington poses a similar challenge to the viewer: are the visions of violence lurid entertainment to the viewer or a means of making the viewer more invested in the proceedings and an eventual just outcome in the film. Herrington is not terribly nuanced here, but he’s resisting the urge to implicate the viewer in the film’s examination of voyeurism. It seems that his moral impulses are too pure.

There’s an alternate version of Jack’s Back that could easily be more of a giallo feature, leaning into its psychosexual associations and the lurid thrill of visions of sex and death. But Herrington is careful not to let his camera leer like the characters do or to allow the proceedings onscreen to grow too lurid, like they would in a De Palma film. He doesn’t want to implicate the viewer; he wants to spur a moral response in them (which leads back to John’s early speech on TV about helping the poor and sick). So Jack’s Back never fully embraces its giallo associations or unleashes the erotic thriller energy of James Spader. But it tiptoes up to the edge and provides some moral examinations that prove that Herrington is more than a director of trash cinema. To label him an auteur might be pushing it, but it’s clear that Herrington was able to work his pet fascinations into his conventionally appealing genre movies.

7 out of 10

Jack’s Back (1988, USA)

Written and directed by Rowdy Herrington; starring James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo, Rod Loomis, Rex Ryon.

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