Back when playing Dungeons & Dragons was all the rage in high school, many fantasy movies came out to cash in on the success of this craze. Remember "Krull", "Conan the Barbarian", "Dragonslayer", "Excalibur", "Ladyhawke", and "The Beastmaster" (and later "Willow")? Well, there's one film that was glossed over by many except the die hard D&Ders: "Hawk the Slayer".
I cannot say the film is great. It's not. The production values and acting are at television level, despite some good talent. The special effects are often jarringly laughable. The attempts at creating character dynamics are pathetic.
And HtS suffers from the tendency of fantasy films to get pretentious in the acting. That is, if the director wants to give a feel of other worldliness to the atmosphere, he tends to use archaic language or, in the case of HtS, have the characters behave one-dimensionally and stereotypically. The result just makes you shake your head.
The music is actually appropriate in its anachronism. This was the 80's, remember, so synthesized music was still cool. The idea was to give the whole movie a "cool" feeling. Of course, it dates the movie completely.
But I remember it fondly. At least *someone* was attempting to portray the D&D world up on the screen. Someone wanted to create the motley crew of multiracial adventurers and put them in an adventure kids could relate to. And truly, the director's heart was in making something halfway fun. That's probably why I remember it so well.
I cannot say the film is great. It's not. The production values and acting are at television level, despite some good talent. The special effects are often jarringly laughable. The attempts at creating character dynamics are pathetic.
And HtS suffers from the tendency of fantasy films to get pretentious in the acting. That is, if the director wants to give a feel of other worldliness to the atmosphere, he tends to use archaic language or, in the case of HtS, have the characters behave one-dimensionally and stereotypically. The result just makes you shake your head.
The music is actually appropriate in its anachronism. This was the 80's, remember, so synthesized music was still cool. The idea was to give the whole movie a "cool" feeling. Of course, it dates the movie completely.
But I remember it fondly. At least *someone* was attempting to portray the D&D world up on the screen. Someone wanted to create the motley crew of multiracial adventurers and put them in an adventure kids could relate to. And truly, the director's heart was in making something halfway fun. That's probably why I remember it so well.