The Jack in the Box: El Origen

Jack kept me in this, even though the story made no sense!

Jack in the Box (2019) is a movie I recently watched on Tubi. The storyline follows a family that discovers an antique Jack in the box in their home. Little do they know this Jack in the box unleashes a creature that kills humans to survive. Once they open the box will they ever be able to close it?

This movie is written and directed by Lawrence Fowler (The Ghost Within) and stars Robert Strange (Penny Dreadful), Lucy-Jane Quinlan (Made You Look), Charles Abomeli (Torchwood) and Simon Balfour (Harlots).

This movie had so much potential and dropped the ball. The Jack has fantastic makeup, costumes, mannerisms and sound effects; unfortunately, the kill scenes are super weak, lack gore and should have been more creative. The acting is fairly mediocre and the ending is a bit predictable.

Overall this is a disappointing addition to the horror genre that should have been better. I'd score this a 3/10 and recommend skipping it.

This film has a great box and an excellent villian. Jack's costume and the actor's movements (especially his facial movements) were a real highlight. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much else. The dialogue feels unnatural and the music score attempts to compensate for this unnatural pace of the plot. The barren set design does not help with the world building either.

Not a deal breaker but, even as a non-american, I could pick that the main character was not from the US, and it breaks the already tenuous realism built in this film.

The demon's costume and performance were fantastic though.

Watch or don't, it won't change you life.

None of the actors were familiar to me and that was perfectly fine. The story was creative and not like a horror film concept I've seen before. It combines the eeriness of some of our greatest fears regarding clowns and the nostalgia of a childhood toy. Excellent character creation, costuming, and movement of Jack. No foul language or gratuitous violence. Not Rated but was a film we watched with our 10 year-old. Give it a chance.

I had not even heard about this 2019 movie when I was given the chance to sit down to watch it here in 2020. But from the movie's cover, this most definitely was a horror movie, and that was what lured me in.

Well, for a horror movie, then "The Jack in the Box" was bland and rather generic. Sure, it was a watchable movie, but writer and director Lawrence Fowler just never managed to bring the movie out of the mediocre lane.

The storyline in "The Jack in the Box" was pretty straight forward, albeit very, very generic. And it was contents that you have seen in other previous horror movies many times before; a demonic entity being caged up inside a physical box, unleashed unto the world unwittingly by someone not knowing what powers they were meddling with. From that point on, the movie was just overly predictable and followed a very generic how-to-make-a-horror movie blueprint, which left very little room for surprises and plot twists, apparently, because there were none of such in the entire movie.

I will say, however, that the demonic Jack in the Box was actually nicely made and had a good, scary appearance. But it was just a bit under-used and didn't come off as being malignant and evil enough. It felt more like just a creepy uncle creeping around in a clown costume. So writer Lawrence Fowler didn't really manage to create something that was all that spooky or disturbing.

The acting in "The Jack in the Box" was adequate, but it was clear that the actors and actresses had precious little contents to work with in terms of script and character development.

All in all, "The Jack in the Box" was a watchable movie, but it was hardly an outstanding or scary horror movie. My rating of "The Jack in the Box" is a four out of ten stars. Watch it if you have the chance and if you have a preference for horror movies, but just don't get your hopes up for a horror masterpiece. This is, however, the type of movie that you watch once, shelf it and never return to watch it again.