CinemaSerf

There were an whole slew of these fantasy adventures made in the late 1970s but this one has to be the weakest, despite the presence of Jack Palance as the half decent baddie "Voltan". He's a nasty piece of work who has killed both his dad and his brother's girlfriend and so unsurprisingly, his sibling "Hawk" (John Terry) is out for blood. That's not going to be easy as he will be facing overwhelming odds and more than a bit of magic, but he manages to assemble a disparate band of fellow freedom fighters and armed with a fellow who can fire a crossbow as if it were a Gatling gun, sets about wreaking his revenge. Palance is ham personified here, lumbering around in his big black cape wielding his huge great sword with all the finesse of a rhino stuck in treacle, but he is way ahead of just about everyone else in this poorly cast adventure. Bernard Bresslaw has the stature for the giant and at times seems engagingly suitable for the part but the rest of the gang seem to be concentrating way too much on the choreography of the tumbling fight scenes and the cues for the visual effects paints to really look like they are enjoying any of this. Sadly, that lack of enthusiasm is contagious as the story just falls to ignite. When the nuns arrive and don't give us a rendition of "How Do You Solve a Problem..." I figured the game was up. I like the genre and was prepared to cut this quite a bit of slack, but in the end it's over-scripted and low-budget fayre that's simply disappointing.