Jack the Giant Killer (2013)

Everything is bad about JACK THE GIANT KILLER, a rubbishy Asylum cash-in on the Hollywood blockbuster JACK THE GIANT SLAYER. This one has a contemporary setting and a beanstalk but otherwise goes through the usual cliches of characters with magical powers, giant CGI creatures, and general samey predictability. This film was shot in Manchester, of all places, with a bunch of actors who display some of the most wooden acting I can remember seeing in a long time; their performances, if they can be described as such, are frankly an embarrassment. The only high point is in the presence of Jane March as the villain of the hour, ageing but still impossibly gorgeous after all these years.

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.

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

Where do I start? Some movies ARE so bad they're good. I love cheesy movies and was in stitches for most of such classics as 'Killer Clowns from Outer Space', Megashark vs Giant Octopus', and 'Robot Jox'. This I did not love. It was annoying. I'm just not entirely sure why this was simply bad and not cheesy. Awful acting, Awful plot (in fact, practically none), poor casting, poor direction, bad special effects. Actually, they weren't ALL bad - maybe the production was taken over seriously. Nope, that can't be it as it's already been pointed out the costumes and props were from entirely different time periods (CCTV cameras on walls anyone?)I think it was simply a lack of care about any single part of the filmmaking process. It's like someone just stood in the street, shouted 'Who wants to make a film that's very loosely based on Jack and the Beanstalk', and the least interested people within earshot all inexplicably volunteered. Don't watch this film (unless you're imminently dying and have nothing better to do when I guess it might actually make your remaining time feel longer)