Sometime in the Middle Ages: Evil Voltan (Jack Palance) has abducted
the abbess (Annette Crosbie) of a monastery for ransom, but knight
Ranulf (Morgan Sheppard) instead enlists the help of Hawk (John Terry) -
the benevolent brother of Voltan, whose fiancée Voltan killed - to help
them, who wields a magic sword & who soon summons the giant Gort
(Martin Bresslaw), the elf Crow (Ray Charleson) & the dwarf Baldin (Peter O'Farrell) for no apparent reason. Together they steal the gold
for the ransom from a slaver & hide it in the monastery to lure
Voltan to the place. Soon, the monastery is under siege by Voltan &
his men, & a nun, who still believes in a peaceful resolution for it
all, betrays Hawk & his friends, & soon they are made captives
by Voltan, while the nun herself soon makes the acquaintance of Voltan's
sword. But of course Hawk & company have enlisted the help of a
good sorceress who frees them & helps them in their final battle
with cheap magic (mainly an indoor snowstorm & laserbeams), which in
the end turns into a man-on-man duel between Hawk & Voltan ... which
Hawk wins of course, & though many of his comrades (Ranulf, Crow
& Baldwin) have died in the process, victory is his & the abbess
is set free, Voltan is dead, but is he ? The last scenes of the film
hint at a sequel that fortunately was never made. This film
was produced when childish fantasy recycling movies were booming in wake
of the incredibly childish & incredibly derivative first Star
Wars movies, but in all, Hawk was a rather sad affair:
The direction lacks any magic so much needed for a fantasy movie, more
resembling a filmed outdoor-theatre-production - the camerawork is
incredibly static, the rather unimpressing forest scenery seems to never
change from a very limited strip of wood, the special effects seem
bottom of the barrell, most of the actors talk & play as if on
stage, the sun seems to be the only light-source (not that all of this
would be essentially a bad thing, just in this case). Furthermore, John
Terry in the lead lacks any charisma much needed for the role (but in
all fairnes, so did Mark Hammill of the Star Wars-movies),
& the music (by the film's producer) a very flat pseudo-rock score
is used in the film rather indifferently & - apart from not creating
anything remotely like a Middle Ages-atmosphere - more often than not
destroys the tension of the respective sequence rather than
complimenting, even augmenting it. |