Review of Jack the Giant Killer (1922) by Iain B — 14 Jan 2013

Now don't get me wrong here. I think Jack the Giant Killer isn't quite up to snuff when it comes to being more or less an imitation of a Ray Harryhausen film, but that's not totally its fault.

The film was actually directed by the same man who directed The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Nathan Juran, so you have to at least cut the film a little bit of slack. Sure the stop-motion effects aren't quite as spectactular or as imaginitive as they are in other films of this type, but it's not completely worthless either.

The story itself is pretty decent, but I think I would have retitled the film as The Adventures of Jack the Giant Killer. Seems more appropriate, being that the film isn't geared toward a final confrontation between Jack and a giant, which is slightly misleading.

I think it's meant to give you an idea of what you're going to see, and in my case, I expected a Clash of the Titans outcome with a final fight between man and beast, but it didn't happen that way.

I'd also recommend the Rifftrax version of the film for some laughs. The movie doesn't rise to even mediocre, but it does manage to reel in the flavor of the genre that was popular at the time.