Review: Hawk the Slayer (1980)
If you can’t be the best, be the first. As my filmography post shows, the 1980s saw a veritable epidemic of sword and sorcery films, cartoons, and even a sitcom. But Terry Marcel’s low-budget Hawk the Slayer (1980) has the dubious distinction of kicking it all off. Born of Marcel’s friendship with composer Harry Robertson—whose synth-heavy score, like Jack Palance, is doing The Most at all times—it’s not great cinema, but it is a cult favorite. Hawk hit UK theaters on December 19, 1980, but limped to US screens two years later, airing as a CBS Late Movie.
1980s Sword & Sorcery
So, why did the sword and sorcery genre have such a moment in the 1980s? One reason is the explosion of source material. The 1960s and 1970s were a golden age for fantasy, sci-fi, and sword and sorcery thanks in part to the influential Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (1969-1974) which printed a mixture of new and long-forgotten fantasy classics.1 Marvel’s wildly popular Conan the Barbarian comics series (based on Robert E. Howard’s 1920s stories) premiered in 1970, and spawned many imitators. Meanwhile, kids like me were busy watching Mattel’s Masters of the Universe (1982-1988) and She-Ra: Princess of Power (1985-1987) after school, while Dungeons and Dragons fueled the genre’s growing foothold (with a side of middle-aged pearl-clutching and conspiracy theorizing).2 So despite its, ahem, execution problems, Hawk fell on already fertile ground.
But 1980s fantasy medievalism feels different from that of previous periods. In the 18th and 19th centuries, medievalism could reflect nostalgia for a simpler world amid industrial change; this was true even in the earlier 20th century, with Tolkien’s concerns about the evils of technology and its destruction of human relationships and the natural world. The 1980s medieval moment, however, feels rooted in something even darker.3 But first, Hawk.
My Review
Hawk was something between a labor of love and a commercial calculation as Marcel noted in several 2015 interviews4 hyping a planned sequel to Hawk that for some strange reason never materialized:
“Harry [Robertson] and I both loved sci-fi and fantasy: Harry Harrison novels, the Conan books, all the greats. I also loved Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which had already been remade as A Fistful of Dollars. One day I said to Harry, ‘I want to remake A Fistful of Dollars with a medieval knight in England…’”
...which seems like a totally normal and not at all psychotic thing to say and not something that would make me back away from you on public transportation. Incidentally I watched Yojimbo in preparation for my upcoming post on Kagemusha (and, you know, as a palate cleanser from Hawk) and I have to say I don’t really see it.
Critics were unamused. According to contemporary reviewer Mike Childs, Hawk was a thoroughgoing “dud” due to its low budget and the fact that Marcel rushed it out to beat other sword and sorcery titles to the market.5 The effects are indeed pretty basic, in keeping with the low budget. The script is silly, and the acting is…very spotty. The ending also leaned hard into a sequel, which always feels awkward when that sequel fails to materialize. This is not a good movie. But it certainly gets interesting at points.
WHAT HAPPENS: Hawk (John Terry), an emotionless surfboard of a warrior with a magic sword sets out to avenge his dead fiancée, save a kidnapped nun, and stop his evil brother, Voltan (Jack Palance, inconveniently 60 years old at the time of filming), with the help of a ragtag band of friends.
ACTUALLY NO NOT GOOD:
Effects. The witch (Patricia Quinn) resorts to hula hoop teleportation, silly string, and some kind of Christmas-light-bedecked Doner kebab to rescue Hawk and his friends. And I had to laugh at, not with, the sped up camera work that emphasizes how fast Crow’s (Ray Charleson) bow skills are. As for our hero, the Mind Sword has the power of appearing in Hawk’s hand whenever he remembers it, usually from about 2 feet away, which doesn’t seem that useful a power to have. The effect for this, Marcel admits, “involved me throwing it to the actor.”
The claiming of the Mind Sword Speaking of “the actor.” Compared with Jack Palance, who spends most of the movie having a manic episode, John Terry’s Hawk is blank as hell. I think he was going for flinty/ stoic Clint Eastwood but instead he just kind of stands there not moving his face for minutes at a time, which is accentuated by repeated long closeups on just his eyes.
Dumb nuns. Unlike many sword and sorcery titles, Hawk doesn’t feature a damsel in distress. Instead, it gives us a convent full of nuns—some hapless, some sneaky—all in distress. It’s interesting to me that the movie was in production in the UK two full years after Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1977) and these are still the nuns they went with. Or that they went with nuns at all? Though see below.
YELLOW CARD:
Han Solo wants his outfit back. Hawk dresses like Han Solo. I don’t know what else to say about this. And that’s despite multiple denials from the director that Star Wars was an influence. But it seems pretty hard to miss — Voltan’s helmet is pure Darth Vader (and like Vader he can’t/ won’t take it off til the end); the Black Wizard channels Emperor Palpatine; and Hawk always shoots first.6
Witches before bros. Hawk’s fiancée Eliane (Catriona MacColl) gets an action scene before sacrificing herself to save him, the witch (Magenta from Rocky Horror, by the way) is easily the most capable member of Hawk’s team, and even the nuns get a surprising amount of screen time not only fully clothed but extra clothed. I feel like this movie has something interesting to say about women knocking around in here, despite the tacky packaging.
Sci-fi noises. As with Return of the King, in 2025 you and I probably wouldn’t put lasers, computer beep-booping in a medieval setting, but in the ‘80s this was perfectly normal (I’m developing a theory about this).
STAMP OF APPROVAL:
Soundtrack. Mike Childs singled out the soundtrack for criticism, but I’m actually pretty into it. Yes, it feels strange to watch a medieval…knight? Dressed as Han Solo and riding repeatedly through the same narrow strip of forest that reminds me of the Bob’s Burgers Florida episode, accompanied by Robertson’s Gene Belcher-approved synthesizer-forward soundtrack. But I also kind of love it.
Jack Palance chewing the scenery. Marcel and Robertson blew their entire budget hiring him, and they got their money’s worth. I kept expecting him to bite the head off a live bat.
A former professional boxer, Palance famously used to drop and do one-armed pushups into his 70s. The Rifftrax. Might be the best way of watching it, honestly.
The 1980s’ medieval future
Though I’ve labeled Hawk and other sword and sorcery movies medieval(ish), medieval fantasy worlds aren’t always rooted in the past — Terry Brook’s infamous Sword of Shannara books (1977-1985) take place in a post-apocalyptic future, as does Walter M. Miller, Jr'.’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), where monastic communities rise from the ashes of nuclear destruction in Utah. Star Wars flips that script: despite its futuristic tech, it’s famously set “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”
Many 1980s sword and sorcery titles blur these lines. Some fold in sci-fi elements (Masters of the Universe) while others venture fully into space (like Krull, Deathstalker, The Warrior and the Sorceress). Most, though, leave their setting (deliberately?) vague. Interestingly, the British Film Institute’s Film Index International describes Hawk as “set in a fantasy land of the future” — though I couldn’t confirm that elsewhere, and it’s not obvious on screen.7
There’s a temporal gulf between the audience and these worlds— it’s not a nostalgic yearning for a simpler past, but a chilling sense that something went terribly wrong in the interim. It’s the opposite of optimistic, progress-driven 1960s visions of the future (think Star Trek). In these films, humanity’s future looks less like an upward arc and more like a plunge off a cliff.
Pessimism was everywhere in late 1970s and early 1980s America, fueled by Watergate, Vietnam, the Carter years, and a growing distrust of institutions. Pop culture of the time echoed apocalyptic anxieties—about government conspiracies, environmental collapse, even child abuse. So while the appeal of stark good-versus-evil narratives is obvious, the “medieval” in many of these films reads less like escapism and more like a grim forecast. As historian Philip Jenkins put it:
“This new Dark Age would soon return society to a preindustrial world. Not in the romantic way the creative anachronists hoped, the future would be medieval.”8
See Jamie Williamson’s fascinating take on how the series retrospectively created the fantasy genre in The Evolution of Modern Fantasy: from Antiquarianism to the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series (Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).
D&D came up often in the context of the 1980s “Satanic Panic.” The private investigator William Dear’s tell-all account of 16 year old James Dallas Egbert III’s allegedly D&D-related disappearance and eventual suicide inspired Rona Jaffe’s 1981 Mazes and Monsters, which became a 1982 film starring Tom Hanks; there’s also a similar 1983 film, Skullduggery (reviews coming…).
See Williamson’s discussion of the 18th- and 19th-century precursors of fantasy in Evolution of Modern Fantasy Chs. 2-4.
Mike Childs, “There’s too much sword, not enough sorcery,” Cinefantastique 11.1 (1981): 45.
"Hawk the Slayer," Film Index International.
Philip Jenkins, Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford, 2006), 72, discussing Isaac Asimov’s 1977 speculative essay for Time magazine in which he describes 1997 America in a world without fossil fuels.