YMMV / Hawk the Slayer

• Anti-Climax Boss: Voltan is not very good at swordfighting. Drogo, his son and lieutenant, is even worse.
• Cliché Storm: As far as fantasy films of the 80s goes, this one's fairly generic and lacking any sort of original identity. We have the hero with the magic sword, the vengeance plot that involves a dead father and a dead lover, the evil overlord who happens to be related to the hero, the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits consisting of a giant, an archer, an elf, and a dwarf, the mage who assists our heroes, the series of disconnected adventures to bring this group of companions together to fight the bad guy, and the special effects driven climactic battle. Take all that but make it a thousand times more silly and ridiculous, and you have Hawk The Slayer in a nutshell.
• Cult Classic: This movie became popular among Dungeons & Dragons fans as it is a cheesy fantasy flick about a multi-racial Ragtag Bunch of Misfits with a magic sword going on a quest to defeat a hammy Evil Overlord.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • So a hero named Hawk goes through a series of disconnected adventures to collect a diverse group of companions, then takes them on a separate quest to gather enough money to finish his actual main quest which he got from a random encounter with a guy carrying an inexplicable and apparently unique automatic crossbow. That's the broad strokes of the first act of Dragon Age II, to the point where the latter is either an homage or blatant ripoff.
  • "And then Voltan will see who is Lord of the Dance."
• Memetic Badass: Crow the elf for his weird multi-shot bow and because he has the highest bodycount in the movie.
• Memetic Mutation: Not from the film itself, but "''Hawk The Slayer'''s rubbish!" (punched in the face!) is an oft quoted line from Spaced, as Bilbo Bagshot's Berserk Button.
• Narm: Copious Narm. On the Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Hawk the Slayer goes clear off the charts to the left. The director seems to have really thought that faux-Western showdowns with hurled two-handed swords, John Terry's blank stare, action scenes with silly-string magic and bouncy balls, the machine-gun bow and crossbow, and Jack Palance's whole-hog hamminess were going to be taken seriously as fantasy drama. The Awesome Music, at the very least, clearly thinks this is all Conanesque high adventure. The deliberate comic relief is extremely sparse next to all the unintentional silliness.
• One-Scene Wonder: Fitzwalter, the Ambiguously Gay English dude whose buddy gets killed by the elf. In the Rifftrax for the movie, he's called the most unctuous man in the land, and it's hard to disagree.
• Questionable Casting:
  • The film's casting process could essentially be summarized like this:
    Filmmaker 1: We need a giant!
    Filmmaker 2: My friend Bernie is kind of tall...
    Filmmaker 1: We need a dwarf!
    Filmmaker 2: My friend Pete is kind of short...
    Filmmaker 1: We need an elf!
    Filmmaker 2: My friend Ray is kind of skinny and can talk funny...
  • The main actor playing Hawk is emotionless, monotone, and devoid of charm...but the bigger problem of the film is in its opening scene. The actor chosen to play Voltan and Hawk's father looks a whole five years older than Jack Palance. It's baffling why they made them brothers when the age gap between the two of them is so huge and yet the age gap between their father and Voltan is laughably too small. Even Rifftrax calls them out on it.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • John Terry (Hawk) would go on to play Felix Leiter in The Living Daylights, and Christian Shephard in Lost. Fortunately he'd learnt to emote by then.
  • In addition, the seeress is played by Patricia Quinn, best known to most of the world as Magenta in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
  • The Abbess is played by Annette Crosbie, who would later be best known for playing Margaret Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave.
• The Scrappy: The dwarf Baldin, although some think of him as an Ensemble Dark Horse for being the only character with a definable personality other than "likes to stare stoically at things" or "unnecessarily hammy".
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: The film is pretty blatantly ripping off Lord of the Rings and other kinds of epic fantasies in the same vein, only with a good 1% of the budget and talent associated with said films.
• So Bad, It's Good: A lot of people think that this is one of the best Sword and Sorcery films, if not the best before The Lord of the Rings got in on the action. It has silly string as a magic immobilization spell.
• Special Effect Failure: Where else can we find a movie with silly string and bouncy balls as magic spells?
  • The actor chosen to play Voltan and Hawk's father looks a whole five years older than Jack Palance. It's baffling why they made them brothers when the age gap between the two of them is so huge and yet the age gap between their father and Voltan is laughably too small. Even Rifftrax calls them out on it.
  Voltan: It is my right as your eldest son.
  Mike: (sputtering in disbelief) Eldest son?! Did he have him when he was three?!
  Hawk, offscreen: Father, are you there?
  Bill: Is Almost Father with you?

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