The setup is pretty standard. There are two brothers. One brother, Voltan (Jack Palance), is evil. The other, Hawk (John Terry), is good. We never find out why one brother is 30 years older than the other. Voltan kills their father. He wants his father’s magic sword so he can do evil deeds. The brothers also have a falling-out over a woman. Voltan has vowed to destroy his brother.
Voltan is holding an abbess to ransom. Hawk is determined to save her but he will need to get hold of a lot of gold. He steals it from a slaver.
He gets assistance from a good witch. She tells him that he will have to get a team together, which he does with her magical help. The team is the giant Gort (Bernard Bresslaw), the dwarf Baldin (Peter O’Farrell) and the elfin archer Crow (Ray Charleson). He already has Ranulf (W. Morgan Sheppard) who is in the service of the abbess’s sisterhood.
There’s lots of action and mayhem. At times Voltan gets the upper hand but then Hawk and his men turn the tables.
Voltan has to get regular magical treatment for a serious face wound which doesn’t serve any plot purpose but it allows Jack Palance to wear a cool sinister helmet that hides half his face.
All the right ingredients are there for a great sword-and-sorcery movie. There’s nothing original to the story but it’s perfectly serviceable.
So what went wrong?
The answer is, everything.
As a director Terry Marcel is completely incompetent. Everything manages to be rather dull when it should be exciting.
It’s visually uninteresting. The special effects look like a lame attempt to ape Star Wars. Or a disco laser light show.
The matte paintings look totally like matte paintings. That’s actually one of the things I do like in the movie - I like matte paintings that look like matte paintings. It’s something that actually works because it gives the film very much an artificial fantasy film look but it’s rather at variance with everything else in the movie which seems to be aiming for grittiness.
John Terry has zero charisma and his performance is totally lifeless.
Bernard Bresslaw was a gifted comic actor but he feels out of place here.
None of the cast members seem to know what’s expected of them.
The fight scenes mostly just don’t quite work.
Jack Palance may be the greatest bad actor in history and he at least provides some entertainment.
There’s a total absence of humour, whether intentional or unintentional. The movie takes itself rather seriously. Bernard Bresslaw could do comedy but plays it very straight. Even Roy Kinnear plays things very straight in his brief appearance. There’s no indication that Marcel was aiming for camp or a tongue-in-cheek approach, or perhaps he simply had no idea how to achieve such a feel.
It could be said in the movie’s defence that sword-and-sorcery was a brand new genre (John Boorman’s Excalibur came out out the following year and Conan the Barbarian followed in 1982) so that the template for the genre was not yet established. But the formula for making adventure movies had been known since the 1920s. And The Land That Time Forgot, from 1975, displayed a perfect knowledge of what was required. My suspicion is that Terry Marcel just had no idea how to approach the subject matter.
A movie like this can work if it’s silly fun but Hawk the Slayer is just not much fun. Not really worth bothering with.
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