Jack: O Matador de Gigantes

While "The Ass-ylum" has become synonymous with poor quality film making and "Mockbusters" they really have plumbed the depths of crassness with this latest offering, their take on the "Jack and the beanstalk" story...

If you consider turning bad movies into drinking games please leave this one alone, you will be blind drunk before you get half way through this shambolic garbage...

What time period is this set in? You have modern helicopters and yet the police where Georgian uniforms, the army wear Dad's Army uniform cast offs and the absolute mismatch of props (Old Browning Camera Antiques et al) looks like they bought any old TAT from car boot sales in order to get props for this carbuncular waste of celluloid...

These people cannot even blame budget as an excuse, plenty of film makers have made much better and more entertaining movies with barely anything and as for the uniform gaffs fancy dress shops will hire out more convincing police uniforms...

As for the acting quality the amateur dramatic society known as "The Ass-ylum" somehow managed to cajole Ben Cross (Who in his time has done some real stinkers) into taking part in this debacle, I can only think that the negatives will be in the post Ben because I can only imagine that blackmail forced you into taking part in this monumentally bad garbage (I am sure your work on Banshee pays the bills)...

The rest of the cast are so cartoon like in their acting (Not that the cajoled Ben Cross is any better) that I have trouble wondering how the hell they got their "Equity Cards" to perform this steaming pile, maybe they are now handing out equity cards in cereal packets now?

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.

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.

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.