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 Jack rescues a princess from an evil sorcerer by killing a giant. When the sorcerer captures the pricness and holds her in his "enchanted fortress" Jack has to rescue her again. 1962, 94 minutes, Widescreen DVD
Uh, so where the magic beans? If I'm watching a movie called Jack The Giant Killer, then I have to believe that somewhere along the way, I'm going to see a dude named Jack get hoodwinked into trading grandma's cow for some magic beans. This means that I also expect some really bad special effects of a big vine snaking its way into the clouds (or just out of camera range - about six feet up I imagine), while the borderline mentally challenged Jack scrambles up the vine in an effort to rescue his cow or whatever it was that was captured by the fee-fie-fo-fumming lard butt that lives up there. This movie had none of those things. There wasn't a magic harp, golden goose, or talking mule in sight!
That was actually okay since all of that had been incompetently accomplished in other films such as the notoriously hideous Jack And The Beanstalk (the fact that it's available from Something Weird Video is pretty much a bad review in itself) and you can only watch a little twerp scampering around in front of a poorly rear projected giant for so long before you wish Jack would end up getting scraped off the giant's size 800 sandal. I was pleased then that it appeared we would have ourselves a real hero since Kerwin Mathews was going to be playing Jack in this film. Kerwin already had a Sinbad movie under his belt as well as a stint as Gulliver in the overlong kiddie flick The 3 Worlds Of Gulliver. Even more importantly, he had a really nice tan. You can't underestimate looking hale and hearty when standing around pretending to react to giant creatures that aren't really there.
Jack is a simple farmer in the kingdom of Cornwall when he gets mixed up in a plot to kidnap a princess. The evil wizard Pendragon (notable for his overly-complicated facial hair that could only be reasonably kept up through an enchantment of some sort) had long ago been exiled from Cornwall, but now was just getting around to setting up a scheme to take over Cornwall. He uses a variation of the tried but true Trojan Horse gag as he arrives in deep cover as a foreign prince no one has ever heard of at the princess' birthday party. Ignoring the old fairy tale maxim to "beware strange princes bearing gifts of a music box with little dancing monster inside of it" the princess gleefully accepts the present and has it brought up to her room once the party is over and it's time for all birthday gals to get some shut-eye and get kidnapped.
Once the princess is fast asleep, the cute little dancing creature that came with her mysterious music box appears and takes his cap off revealing a horned head! Then he starts growing and growing and growing until he breaks through the ceiling of her bedroom. The giant grabs her and makes off with her with the King's men in hot pursuit. Down at the docks, Pendragon's dwarf henchman (he's actually just a guy who isn't very tall. You kind of wish they would have sprung for a real dwarf, but this dude did have a slight facial disfigurement so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.) waits with the getaway boat. Is there no one in the whole of the kingdom that can save the lovely princess? (In spite of this loveliness, her screeching later on in the movie would become quite grating and you were pleading with Pendragon to cast a spell to shut her up.)
For farmer Jack, he didn't wake up looking to be a hero that day, but by golly sometimes you just have to jut your jaw out, narrow your eyes, grab your axe and defend the honor of some primo piece of royal tail, the morning's chores be damned! ! I'd like to think that Jack would have risked life and limb had the princess been a tubby broad with halitosis and a bad complexion, but thankfully we'll never have to know! Jack's reality is that a hot princess is being held captive on a boat by a ugly little man and he knows instinctively that that just ain't right.
The opening twenty minutes of the film is rip-snorting action of the giant-killing kind. Jack is a veritable early bird buffet of action moves as he kicks in a door, runs around hiding under wagons, lassoes the giant, jumps on him, stabs him all up, and walks out of his big match with the title "Giant Killer" which would be pretty nifty except that they keep putting his first name in front of it. If he insisted on retaining a first name, he could have at least taken a page from the real heroes of history and gone with something like Hercules, Goliath, or Maciste. And even though Kerwin was all tanned up for this movie, would it have hurt him to get oiled up and intimidate some of the bad guys with a few well placed posedowns? Never underestimate the power of flexing your pecs and blasting your quads while staring down the gaping maw of some sea serpent.
Despite the movie opening up with a good dose of sustained action, it immediately begins to wear out its welcome. The biggest problem this movie had was its over reliance on its simply atrocious special effects. Some of the monsters in this one were done in the Ray Harryhausen style. That's supposed to mean that we're going to be seeing some stop motion action of creatures lovingly crafted and animated, but what we get are badly sculpted monsters and lots of bad animation accompanying their activities. I was watching some of these things and thinking that it looked like amateur claymation more than anything else. The kicker though was that as crappy as these effects were, director Nathan Juran did nothing to camouflage the effects' shortcomings. He just let these things go on and on.
Quick cuts, creative editing, and lots of reaction shots from Kerwin were what was called for, but instead these various monsters got as much screen time as anyone else, eventually overwhelming us with their underwhelming presence and ultimately sapping any enjoyment you might have otherwise gotten from this. There's a scene after Jack kills the giant where he and the king and the army all stand around looking at the dead giant and they just keep using this same terrible composite shot with the giant in the foreground. Couldn't they have sprung for an oversized prop giant head at least?
After Jack dispatches the first bad special effect, the king promotes him to Sir Jack and once they figure out that Pendragon is trying to kidnap the princess the king sends she and Jack on a secret voyage to a convent where they'll hide the princess until they can take care of Pendragon. There's a traitor in their midst though and Pendragon finds out about the plan and sends a gaggle of flying witches to intercept the ship. There's a big battle and the witches capture the princess. Afterwards, the crew of the ship chucks Jack overboard since he wants to go after the princess and they just want to go home. Also in the water with him is his new young sidekick Peter. Normally, I would be against the acquisition of a new young sidekick, but Peter gets turned into a chimp wearing a pair of black briefs later on in the film, so I think you can see that whatever else may have gone wrong with this movie, they knew what they were doing there.
Realizing that the more sidekicks the merrier, the movie has Jack and Peter picked up by a Viking named Sigurd. Sigurd has a sidekick of his own. He's got an imp in a bottle! This imp turns out to be a leprechaun who's trapped in the bottle because of some scandal involving a pair of gold boots he made. I tuned out that little cretin as soon as it became evident that he would only speak in rhyme. Let's just say that his mad skillz on the mike were definitely not whack and/or dope. The imp does have three magic coins he can use to help out Jack during his upcoming battle with Pendragon. They ain't no magic beans, but I guess it's something.
Jack and his imp buddy show up at Pendragon's apparently not too secret hideout and encounter various monsters that they have to defeat. Jack doesn't actually have to do a whole lot because he has the imp whispering in his ear the whole time about how to get around whatever obstacle Pendragon has put in his path. It doesn't make for a very suspenseful battle, but Jack does break the enchantment that Pendragon has put on the princess which turned her evil (you knew she was evil because of all the make up she was wearing as well as the cool outfit she had on). Somewhere during all of this is when Pendragon turns Peter and Sigurd into animals and thus we are treated to the image that will stay with you longer than any other in the movie: Jack and the Princess running for safety across a beach while Jack is holding the hand of a chimp! You also get to see a giant throw that stupid dog around, though the imp sadly remains unharmed.
The movie finishes up just as it began - with an extensive battle between Jack and a poorly realized monster. Pendragon has turned into a harpy and Jack ends up on its back stabbing at it with his sword in scenes that left me wishing I could see the cutting edge technology of those old Davey and Goliath bible cartoons. Despite the movie having a good variety of action, the incompetently done effects are a real turn off. They also loaded Jack up with too many buddies in the second half of things. What was the purpose of Peter? Anything that he did, could have been accomplished with the imp or with Sigurd. He seemed merely to be there so they could have a little kid in what basically amounted to a little kid's picture. If you're looking for the kind of action they attempt in this movie, you're better off sticking with name brands like Sinbad or Jason and his Argonauts. It's good to see these old fantasy movies getting released on DVD, but it's bad to actually have to see them. Don't go trading your cow for this one.
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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