Jack the Giant Killer

While I hate most of the Asylum's movies with a passion, I keep watching because there is something somewhat entertaining about their awfulness and also there's a glimmer of hope that they'd do something halfway tolerable. The Asylum oddly enough have made a few tolerable movies though the best they get is only decent. Jack the Giant Killer is not the worst from them, but it is still really bad. It looks amateurish from a starting point. Watching the costumes, sets and props I didn't and still don't have a clue about what time period the movie was supposed to be set in, and the laughable special effects(especially with some of the worst dinosaur, seemingly poor and personality-less substitutes for giants, effects I've seen for any movie) and editing that looks that someone was having a drug hallucination are no better. The music sounds weird, is not memorable in the slightest and doesn't fit at all. The dialogue is stilted and often sounded like senseless babbling with the actors clearly struggling to get their words out, it also has a lot of cheese and this is when the murky sound is not drowning it out too much. The story, aside from it having a complete lack of originality and borrowing heavily from the likes of Jurassic Park and Aliens, is a structurally thin bore that doesn't make sense or have any charm, fun, wonder, thrills or heart. In my mind, the attempt to mix a Grimms fairytale-like atmosphere with a quasi-modern twist also didn't gel. The characters are annoying and never developed, they're just there for the sake of it. The acting is poor, Jamie Atkins badly under-performs to the point that his performance is lost amidst everything else. Ben Cross and Jane March(who actually gives the movie's best performance) fare better but are severely under-used so while they try hard their characters just don't register and they don't bring much particularly new to them either. To conclude, not The Asylum's worst but has nothing to recommend it apart from perhaps Jane March's beauty. 1/10 Bethany Cox

Firstly look at that poster... see that scary monster on the front with those massive teeth? Yeah? Not in the movie!

There are monsters, some the size of dinosaurs and one more like Godzilla in proportions, but they are all the same species, a sort of short tailed 6 eyed bull like reptile. The big one is the same CGI model but scaled up.

The acting / dialogue is stilted and funny. It has a delightful amateur- dramatics quality to it. And the guy playing the general is hamming it up to Monty Python standards. Nothing about this is remotely believable but as another reviewer noted, the floaty castle is quite nice. Though powered by a fire that looked barely strong enough to toast marshmallows on. The CGI - is very bad, very 90s. Probably someone with a copy of some 3D software offered to do it for free. The worst is the whip effects of the beanstalk.

Anyway I highly recommend you don't waste money on this - if you can watch it for free and make a drinking game or something silly out of it then you may have a better evening than I did.

This movie was made with one purpose: to trick people into buying the DVD/blue-ray of "Jack the giant killer", only to be disappointed it isn't the blockbuster movie "Jack the giant slayer" they thought it was. There cannot have been any other reason or intention for making it because this movie is the very worst of utter crap. It really is just the stolen movie title filled with garbage. However, there is a story in there. It has actors, it has special effects, though extremely bad, appalling, awful. The movie has inconsistency written all over it. Nothing makes any sense, at all. The script, the acting, props, action scenes, - nothing measures up to any standard other than making a buck from stealing the title from a blockbuster by just throwing something together badly without much of a budget. The dinosaur cgi was half decent though. I cannot blame the actors for bad acting, when probably everything was shot in one take. There simply may have been no time or budget to re-do anything. Perhaps the actors were also lured into this sham, ignorant of it's true nature. There should be laws against this shameless deceit. On the other hand, some bad movies - because they were done badly, either for the lack of skill or on purpose - gain a cult status. This one will not.

Just to describe some major issues: Jack, an ordinary kid, is building/finishing some sort of battle robot as in "Avatar". The feet of the thing are shown several times walking on grass, in the opening scene. Clearly, it is just a couple of cardboard boxes with some spray paint. And he's building this thing for what reason? And with what means? No matter, he's got it working right in the nick of time, to kill the giant dinosaur in the end scene. Another delight is the flying castle. The "engine room" is nothing but an old smith's forge with forging tools hanging on the wall. The beans don't add up. Jack receives two beans. Which he throws away into a field (and grow into a beanstalk). Later, his stepsister finds another bean in Jack's jacket, and plants that one. At the very end of the movie, Jack manages to find another one of those beans in his pocket. Even if he threw away only one bean and inconsistently put the other in his pocket, still one extra bean has magically appeared somehow.

As mentioned in the other reviews, the time setting is inconsistent - old cameras and modern helicopters. Well the list is really endless. My conclusion is, that if you have ocd and enjoy counting goof-ups, you might like this movie a lot. Also it might be fun, to try to explain all the apparent inconsistencies.

this movie would turn every atheist like me to rediscover religion. why? because when i watched it, i couldn't help repeatedly murmuring (actually cursing?) with lot of religious words that only the die-hard church goers would recite faithfully before and in front of every sentence: OMG....oh my god, Jesus...., oh, my lord....oh, lord of mercy...." these words i usually warned myself not to blur out under any circumstance, just wanted to enforce my disbelief of god or gods in plural form. what the bible, the preachers, the reverends or any religion pitching con artist failed to turn me around, this movie succeeded without any difficulty. omg (here's another one repeated helplessly), i rarely saw anything worse than this movie, jack the giant killer was not a giant killer but a metal junkyard welder. he welded a primitive horrible awkward manual robot in the barn and that crappy giant welded together junk could use its hand gun to burst hell fire. this film somehow also might get an Oscar for its naivety, its shallow original script and the worst and most terrible actors, the awkwardness simply surpasses any movie now playing on the screen. i rest my case.

I knew it wasn't the Hollywood version. I saw it on Netflix and my daughter is in a 'giant' phase so thought to give it a try.

Dialogue is awful. Acting is awful. Army in charge guy is awful. Jack is awful. Costumes, props out of place. Cgi is awful. Decisions are illogical. Awful nonsense.

Basically, wannabe untalented actors starring in a film with no budget and a very poor script. Sure, why not and I hope they had fun but the end film is crap.

I've said all I needed to above and these extra lines are for padding to meet IMDBs review length requirement.