JACK THE GIANT KILLER (1962)

 

In contrast, JACK THE GIANT KILLER uses many of the same elements seen in VOYAGE but succeeds in giving them at best only a trifling degree of mythic resonance.

Whereas Harryhausen, Juran and Kolb managed to find common ground between the original Sinbad-tales, the Odyssey, and the basic "princess-in-peril" story, Juran and Hampton seem to have chosen the "Jack the Giant Killer" stories simply because it suggested a way to work in a lot of titanic creatures.  The special effects team-- of whom the best known members were Jim Danforth and Wah Chang--  follows the pattern Harryhausen set in a mechanical fashion. If Harryhausen began VOYAGE with a giant, satyr-legged creature menacing normal-sized humans, then JACK does the same.  If VOYAGE had actors Kerwin Matthews and Torin Thatcher locked in combat as respective hero and villain, so must JACK-- though Thatcher plays a different type of character, if not a particularly successful one. If VOYAGE has a genie in a bottle, JACK has a leprechaun in a  bottle. If one of VOYAGE's climactic scenes pits its cyclops against a green dragon, JACK must have a two-headed giant battle a giant green sea serpent.  The last conflict contains an element of probably unintentional humor, when the tentacled sea serpent "bitch-slaps" the giant across both of its ugly faces.

The most interesting alteration in JACK is that though Jack, just like Sinbad, spends most of the film attempting to free a princess from an evil sorcerer, Elaine lacks the elegant simplicity of Parisa, and registers as nothing more than a cypher.  She becomes more visually interesting when the sorcerer Pendragon uses his Satanic magic to morph Elaine into a witchy beauty, but she isn't evil in any interesting way, and doesn't really do anything that evil before Sinbad manages to transform her back to normal.

Whereas Harryhausen and Kolb apparently had an instinct for combining different strains of myth and folklore, Hampton's script simply imposes a superficial conception of "evil witches" over the template of Jack's giant-killing adventures.  Only once does Pendragon do something authentically "witchy," when he conjures in the name of Isis while kissing a skeleton's hand, but the script merely throws this bit of magical detail out with no context.

 Though VOYAGE's Sokurah is no more complex than Pendragon, his motives for gaining the supreme power over the lamp has a strong elemental appeal.  In contrast, there seems to be no particular reason as to why Pendragon wants control over the kingdom of Cornwall.  Too often Pendragon's demons, when not being rendered in stop-motion, appear as nothing but actors in monster-suits, and many of the stop-motion creatures have plastic-ky eyes, detracting from any sense that they might be alive. 

JACK is not a terrible film, but it has no imaginative center.  VOYAGE is using myth and folklore for entertainment aimed at juveniles, but it comes much closer to the tone and feeling of the originals.