The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb

The most amazing thing about the fantastic world evoked by Dave Borthwick is its occasionally frightening ugliness and cruelty. Combined with a story that can only be described as fairy-tale, this yields a striking film. Tom Thumb is an amiable little man who is miraculously (well, more as a result of a technical error in the reproduction plant) born into a dark gloomy city with poor, shabby and miserable parents. Agents of the dictatorship of the gloomy city get wind of the miraculous Tom and take him from his parents to have him investigated in a spooky laboratory. The lab is populated by brutal researchers and a choice selection of mutant monsters. Tom makes friends with several mutants and manages to escape through the sewer. The sewerage system turns out to be a world in itself and the slimy realm of Jack, the Giant Killer.