Okay, enough stalling. You've seen this movie before, you can handle it. You've watched fucking Pirhana and Night of the Lepus. This movie will not beat you.
"Play Feature". No turning back now, the thread's been created and responded to.
Title Card: This is a story of Heroic Deeds and the bitter struggle for the triumph of Good over Evil and of a wondrous Sword wielded by a mighty Hero when the Legions of Darkness stalk the land.
Someone please tell the Writers that Capitalizing Certain Words is more Pretentious Stupidity than it is a means of Emphasis.
Horse in fog. Trees in fog. Somewhere, Akira Kurosawa is weeping. Oh, look, it's Voltan! Hi, Jack!
Voltan's father is in the gold-plated Room of Ostentatiousness, meditating-or-something. Voltan quietly dispatches the only guard in the entire castle and just waltzes into the room.
Hawk now approaches from the same direction as Voltan. So that entire castle was the residence of their father and one guard.
Blather about "the ancient power." Spoiler alert: it's the cheesiest sword in film history. I tried to hunt a video clip of the scene in question, but even You Tube has its limits for silly shit people will upload. I'll have to describe it when it happens shortly.
Voltan stabs their father, then casually leaves through one door while Hawk bursts in the other. They spent the entire budget for this movie on Jack Palance and gold spraypaint for this room (and for the hand). Daddy dies, but not before a bit of expogab:
Father: The prophecy is fulfilled, my son. The evil I have spawned... will now pollute... the land.
Oh, so you made this movie!
Okay, I will describe this next scene as clearly as possible, so that you can picture it. Hanging from a protruding bit on the (gold colored) wall is a sword. It is currently the most ridiculous sword in the world, but it is about to become even moreso.
Its hilt is gold, and its pommel nut is shaped like a life-sized fist. This is not only awkwardly large compared to the hilt, but stupid looking to boot. Otherwise, the sword is a pretty average replica longsword.
At his (dying) father's instruction, Hawk places the sword between them, embedding its blade in the floor while the whole time acting like he's been told to wash the dishes and mow the lawn.
He takes a rock out of a leather pouch and stares at it (again, under instruction from a dying man) until it glows bright fucking green, string-levitates out of his hand, and floats over to the sword.
The sword is, for one scene, replaced with a grip's hand, spraypainted gold, which opens up. The stone lands in the open hand, which grips the stone. We now have the Sword of Mind mentioned in the trailer.
Father: Think... of the Great Sword in your hand... and it will be so.
Just. Fucking. Die. Already.
Father: The Mind Sword is now yours, my son.
I bet he never called Voltan that. He probably turned to evil after his dad started calling him "servant of the Devil" and "Dark One." In any case, Father dies (he's never given a name at all), and Hawk rushes past the spraypainted grip Mind Sword to his side, but it's too late. The movie has begun. Remember that scene in The Empire Strikes Back where Luke uses the Force to grab his lightsaber? Picture that, only with the aforementioned Sword of Stupid, and slower, and with Luke doing it for shits and giggles instead of because it was the only way he could reach.
Then pretend Luke has this absolute hatred for floors and stabs them at every fucking opportunity while swearing that Voltan will die.
And then we get credits. I've already commented on the screaming hawk in the trailer, so I'lljust comment on the insanely disco theme song and the presence of fucking Patricia Quinn in this. Somehow, this is a step down for her. A bunch of other names roll by that aren't at all familiar, probably because I didn't grow up watching BBC dramas in the late 70s and early 80s, but instead watching the American equivalents, Magnum PI, Murder, She Wrote, and so on.
The music, I note, is by Harry Robertson and gets its own copyright boilerplate. Because that is some epic film scoring, there.
Original Story and Screenplay by Terry Marcel and Harry Robertson oh god this is a vanity project my theory is confirmed it all makes sense now arrghgharble.
As the credits continue, we are introduced to a new character: old guy with a crossbow. Old guy with a crossbow drags himself up the front steps to a Doctor Who soundstage pretending to be an abbey, where two nuns in white terrycloth robes haul him inside. YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I'M NOT EXAGGERATING THE LOW PRODUCTION VALUES.
They chop his hand off, because being in this movie isn't suffering enough (also, his hand is injured "he's got no fingers!" because they were "left on some battlefield"). Old guy is referred to by name, but I can't understand the woman speaking because they only have one boom mic and it's over him because he can't fucking speak up. It sounds like "Artumouse," so I shall call him Artie.
Artie's village was attacked by "the Devil Himself", and Artie's looking for someone to get revenge. The nuns are all Good Cannot Comprehend Evil, and want to know who could possibly kill women and children. We are not at all shocked to discover it's "Voltan, the Dark One." And this seems like a good place to update.
