Hawk the Slayer (1980)
Dir. Terry Marcel
It borrows plot from quite a few different sources, including Tolkien, the Western genre, and a well-known sci-fi film that I refuse to name (hint: it rhymes with bar wars).
John Terry is Hawk, a leading man with an impractically-balanced magic sword, but the script doesn't push him to the fore like you might expect. If you were to add up his screen time, it's probably not much more than some of the other heroes. He's too phlegmatic to be considered charismatic, so it's not much of a loss.
Hawk's face-ache evil sibling is Voltan - The Dark One, played by Jack Palance. He hams it up well, hissing and shouting on cue, but I got the feeling he was slightly embarrassed to be there.
- Fighting the good fight: the heroes, doing their best Metal band line-up impression. -
The majority of the film appears to have been shot in and around the same few hundred square feet of beautiful English forest. I don't know if it actually was, but I'm sure I saw the very same tree multiple times in what was supposed to be different locations.
Harry Robertson's bitchin' soundtrack is a strange blend of ear-honey. It's like a 1970s folk band ripped off Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds (1978) album, added snippets of Ennio Morricone's Spaghetti Western scores and padded it all out with pastoral interludes.
It's a peculiar and difficult film to defend, but I'm absolutely still a fan of it. It seems like the creators were planning (or hoping) for a sequel, but it never appeared. That's a shame.
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