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Synopsis: Hawk and Voltan are brothers. One is good, the other evil. Voltan blames Hawk for stealing the woman he loves. He accosts Hawk and Hawk's new wife in the woods and torments Hawk with his crossbow. Hawk's wife clouts him with a flaming branch, but gets shot by Voltan's crossbow, but Hawk escapes. Voltan then kills their father when he won't give him the secret of the last of the elfin mindstones. Before the old man dies, however, he grants the secret to Hawk and shows him how to use the mindstone to make a mindsword. Voltan (now known as "The Dark One," afterwards, rampages across the countryside. Ranulf, the last survivor of one of his raids stumbles into a convent one night, seeking medical attention. As he mends, Voltan storms into the convent, abducts the Abbess, and demands a ransom. Ranalf is dispatched to the Abbot, who refuses to pay the ransom, but instead tells Ranulf to seek "the one called Hawk." Meanwhile, Hawk wanders the country side righting wrongs. He stumbles upon a group of vigilantes who intend to burn a woman as a witch. The mindsword demonstrates its power by deflecting arrows and terrifying small minds with it's eerie green glow. The woman, who really IS a witch. She tells him to seek out Ranulf as a step towards a final confrontation with Voltan. Hawk rescues Ranulf from some bandits and they are on their way. Voltan, meanwhile, amuses himself by terrorizing tradesmen for information about Hawk, including having the tongue of a mouthy peasant removed. Hawk gathers up companions with whom to take on Voltan: Gort, a giant,: Crow, an Elf; and Baldin, a Dwarf. Hawk transports all of them from the cave of the witch. When he finds them, each of them is engaged in minor skirmishes that illustrates their characters: Gort is a laconic strongman, Crow a stoic archer, and Baldin an uncouth slob. Our heroes then hatch a plan to get the Abbess back. They rob some slavers of their ill gotten booty to raise a ransom as bait for Voltan. Meanwhile, Voltan's sadistic son, Drogo, is plotting against him. He gets wind of Hawk's plan and launches a preemptive strike to seize the ransom for himself. Hawk's band of warriors sees them off in short order and sends Drogo back to his father, mortally wounded. Voltan adds this to his list of grudges. Knowing that they are flushed out, Hawk and his companions decide to take the fight to Voltan. Unfortunately, the Abbess's weak-willed (and idiotic) second in command betrays them to Voltan, setting up a final, fatal confrontation...

Low Fantasy: I am at something of a loss to explain the rash of sword and sorcery fantasy movies in the early 80s. I mean, I can understand some one wanting to make an animated version of The Lord of the Rings, but that movie tanked so hard that the second half of the story never made it to the screen. Sure, Conan the Barbarian was a hit, but it wasn't THAT big a hit. Hawk the Slayer came out before Conan had made a ripple. And what a bastard creation it is. Neither a violent exploitation movie or a whimsical adventure, it has something of the feeling of the kind of dumb fantasy that has lately found itself ensconsed in the vampiric half-life of syndicated television. It has action, but shies away from spilling blood on camera (for instance, Voltan stabs a character and pulls a clean knife from his victim...). There is no sex, either, and nary a scantily clad dancing girl is to be seen anywhere. Hell, it even LOOKS like it was made for television. It's certainly as dumb as the dumbest episode of Xena. The film even blatantly sets up further episodes as the evil wizards cart Voltan's body away from the crypt at the end. And who the hell are those guys, anyway? The movie doesn't explain. Presumably the ensuing series would have filled in the exposition. Also never explained: if Voltan already has a son (who looks to be as old as Hawk) and by inferrence a wife, then what the hell is he doing coveting Hawk's wife? What does the family tree look like here? My suspicion is that Drogo's sole reason for existence is to die so Voltan can vow revenge.

Performances: Jack Palance phones in his job here. His performance as Voltan consists in the main of hissing and posturing from behind a helmet that looks suspiciously like Darth Vader's helmet. Of course, the part that is written for him has one note, so maybe Palance can be excused for playing it that way. I should digress for a second about Voltan: he is never really sympathetic, even in the flashback sequences. I can only surmise that the screenwriters have never actually read an issue of The Fantastic Four comic book, since Voltan is Doctor Doom without the superscientific genius and the tragic backstory. Doctor Doom was not a villain until his face was disfigured. Voltan starts out as a villain. This is actually pretty wrongheaded, but this is par for the movie, I guess.

Bad as Palance is, John Terry as our hero is even worse. He is an actor with no presence and a flat speaking voice. He isn't physically imposing, either. I presume that he got the part because he knew some one, or perhaps because he was an available American actor designed to make the film appealing to the lucrative US market. Both Palance and Terry stand out like a sore thumb amid all the British actors, although it should be noted that Palance's leonine hiss of a voice has a quality that transcends accents--it's an entity unto itself. Among the Brits, only Ray Charleson is bad as Crow the Elf. Apparently, when the make-up guys put the ears on him, he immediately thought he was a Vulcan. He delivers all of his lines like a robot. The rest of the cast is actually pretty good, particularly Bernard Bresslaw as Gort (speaking of robots, why is he named for the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still ?) and Morgan Sheppard is fine as Ranulf. Harry Andrews is a familiar face as the Abbot. Patrick Magee is listed in the credits as "Priest," but I didn't spot him.

Production Values: Ah . . . I suspect that Hawk the Slayer was filmed on standing sets at Pinewood Studios. They look too good in relation to the rest of the production to be purpose built. The convent set looks particularly convincing. The sets and the woodland landscapes are the best things in the film and the mists that hover over everything add much needed atmosphere. But then, there are the special effects . . . Most of the effects in this film consist of rapid jump cutting. When this is used to depict the Elven archer machine-gunning a couple of dozen guys, it lapses into unintended hilarity. And what the hell is up with the cave witch's glowing hula hoop teleportation pod ("You WILL bow down to me, Jor-El!") or her glowing ping pong ball meteor shower? Which reminds me . . .if she's so all powerful, how the hell did the witch hunters get the drop on her? As jawdropping as the special effects are, everything takes a back seat to the music. Screenwriter/Producer Harry Robertson also composed the score, which sounds like a weird combination of Fairport Convention-ish British neo-Folk music, mid-seventies prog-rock, and early eighties New Wave. It's a strange mixture that once in a while matches the movie, but more often serves as a serious distraction. To get an idea of how much at odds the movie and the music are, imagine, if you will, what would happen if Isaac Hayes were to re-score Lawrence of Arabia. 

Have I mentioned how dumb this movie is? Good. I thought I might have missed that part while I was rambling.

As a final note: the copy of the film I watched for this review is the USA Home Video edition from 1985. USA was one of those video companies (like Vestron and Embassy) that went belly up in the late eighties and consigned the rights to their outlandishly large catalogues to legal limbo for nearly a decade. The tape includes a number of trailers at the end of it (I swear to God, during the eighties, no video company on Earth realized that the previews are SUPPOSED to go at the beginning of the tape). One of these trailers was for Supergirl, which made me thankful that I had chosen to watch Hawk the Slayer instead. I saw Supergirl in the theaters and it was far more painful to watch than this. The other two trailers, on the other hand, were for Richard Lester's The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers, two movies that have AMAZING swordfights in them. Even next to the previews alone, Hawk the Slayer looks like very small potatoes.