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

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.

What a sad state of affairs when Asylum (the makers of this sad little tale) throws out garbage like this with a cast of people who aren't even trained in the art of acting. Wow, they must have taken the directors wife and kid hostage to make him do it. One consolation, this film of inferior quality should only have taken a couple of weeks to throw together so no real harm done.

The story starts of with some Real Steal rip off material as Jack is fixing his robot (I know, lol...I don't remember Aliens style robots in any other version of Jack...Beanstalk before!) while struggling to say his lines and use his hands at the same time. lol yes, I remembered a classic bit of acting when we first see the ridiculous beanstalk in a field. There is a cop standing there with a very small crowd of people and he's right in front of them saying "nothing to see here, move along", I was like WTF! Nothing to see? Also the way he was holding this crowd of 4 people back was stupid. They are in a field and can stand anywhere but chose to all squeeze in front of the only cop there. Another thing is, when Jack gets nabbed by the tree branch thing and gets taken up in front of everyone. Not one person seems to notice it happening!! Garbage, garbage, garbage.

I don't do the "this is the worst film ever" speech because it's cliché and rarely true. I have to say though, it's damn close. The acting is atrocious, the editing looks like it was done by a crack addict badly needing a fix and the music, the mf'king music! Where in the hell did they dig it up from? It sounded a bit like those,(I'm not too sure of the name) Stylaphone? Is that the thing Rolf Harris used to advertise? Well, it sounded like that.

Not a film to be watched, even if your bored, drunk, high, low...in fact...just don't watch it. I did and I'm still queasy.

Well, this movie was nothing at all what I had expected it to be. I had expected somewhat of a new interpretation of the classic tale of Jack and the bean stalk, but alas, that was not to be.

This is a story that borrows heavily from that story yes, but it does so in a very nonchalant way. It does however, pardon my French, manage to butcher up the entire story and try to put a weird, modern twist to it. But it just failed in every aspect.

The story ends up being a very broken apart set of fragments that doesn't really add up to a greater picture or unity. You just sit there wondering how this could come to be.

Mind you, that this is a The Asylum production, so that is a clear warning sign right there. I wasn't aware of that prior to obtaining the movie, and had I known, I wouldn't have wasted time or money on it. This is by far one of the more questionable movies from The Asylum that I have seen so far.

The CGI effects in the movie were quite bad, especially the big dinosaur-like creatures. They were just laughable. I will say that the floating brick building was actually quite nicely made, so thumbs up for that at least.

As for the acting, well there was nothing exceptional or mentionable here, and not even Ben Cross could manage to lift up anything in this particular movie.

This movie was definitely not meant for me as the audience, and it was a very strained ordeal to get through it. I ended up picking up my phone and playing some game during it as well, as I sort of lost interest in the storyline, which wasn't particularly solid to begin with, but I did manage to finish the movie. However, what would appeal to anyone in this movie is hard for me to put my finger upon; perhaps if you are a die-hard fan of anyone in the movie, but other than that, I just don't see the appeal.