(Originally posted on
Hawk the Friggin’ Slayer. Yes, I’m going there. You bet your ass.
Cast your mind back (if you’re young enough) to the year of 1980. There, gifted unto the world was the glorious cheese of Hawk the Slayer. I first witnessed this wondrous spectacle on HBO (before there were more than one HBOs.) This happened briefly after the insidious, Satan-worshipping evil of Dungeons and Dragons possessed me. Other than the animated Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, D&D fandom had few cinematic representatives.
Then along comes a cheesefest filled to the brim with elves, dwarves, giants, magic swords and witches. Oh sweet Demogorgon, yes!
What did I care that the majority of the special effects consisted of glowing superballs, smoke pots, shiny hula hoops and bad stop-motion arrows? It mattered naught! To battle!
Anyway, the plot is pretty simple. Bad guy brother Voltan (played by the scenery-chewing Jack Palance) kills his father the king. Good guy brother Hawk (played with wooden fortitude by John Terry) gets the gift of “The Mindsword” from dad and swears to avenge his death. The power of The Mindsword (so far as I can determine) consists of reacting to the wielder’s mental commands and lighting the way through a haunted forest at one point. Other powers are a bit murky–try again later.
Voltan sports a Darth Vader style helmet that helps conceal his burned features. Burned, incidentally, by Hawk’s lady love right before Voltan kills her. Yeah, Voltan’s a shitty brother. You can kinda see why he’s never invited to family reunions.
Years later Voltan’s ravaging the countryside, like a good villain. He kidnaps the Abbess of a convent and tries to ransom her back to the church. Unsure which god the church worships. Scientology? Instead a crossbowman named Ranulf (W. Morgan Sheppard) wounded by Voltan seeks a group to help rescue the Abbess and defend the convent. This is where we get a “Magnificent Seven” vibe as a group of misfits (Player Characters or Murder Hobos–you decide) is assembled by Ranulf and Hawk. The group consists of: Gort the Giant (Bernard Bresslaw from Krull “fame”), Crow the Elf (Ray Charleson), Baldin the Dwarf (Peter O’Farrell) and The Sorceress (Patricia Quinn).
At least half of these folks are recruited by rescuing them from brigands. Seriously, there are brigands all over the place. Brigands stealing. Brigands trying to burn witches. Brigands cheating at archery contests. It’s like a brigand convention. I figure half of this world’s population is brigands.
The lion’s share of the rest of the movie consists of the group playing cat and mouse with Voltan and killing a lot of his redshirts. Lots. How Voltan kept recruits with his attrition rate just tells you more about brigand overpopulation than the quality of his leadership. Keep your brigands spayed and neutered.
There follows the inevitable confrontation between the brothers. You can guess what happens.
This film was slapped together in six weeks for a mere six hundred thousand pounds in Buckinghamshire, England. (This explains the preponderance of British actors in it.) The movie had a theatrical release in the UK, but the production company ITC went tits-up before it could be released in the United States. Instead it became cable television fodder and a warm, cheesy memory to hordes of nerds everywhere. Afterward, it became a cult movie classic to the point that a campaign happened to create a sequel called Hawk the Hunter. Unfortunately, the Kickstarter campaign failed miserably.
Enjoy.
