![]() Its most likely antecedent is the wonderful, if unfinished, 1978 animated adaptation of Tolkien’s classic, playing in UK cinemas at the time of Hawk the Slayer’s development. Mostly, Marcel’s film seems to have largely been inspired by a CliffsNotes of The Lord of the Rings. Kurosawa-esque in its lazy narrative, the film is also peppered with action motifs unashamedly stolen from Westerns, like Mexican standoffs with swords, Spaghetti pan pipes and a repeating crossbow straight out of Peckinpah. ![]() Already burdened with the worst cinematic sins of the genre, before they even had chance to become sins, it’s difficult to trace the film’s Fantasy lineage. Like some hero or monster from mythology, it seemed to spring into existence fully formed. You have to question how Hawk the Slayer came to be. Greed might have been good in the 80s, but you can have too much of a good thing. Despite these efforts, the Fantasy films of the past haven’t received very much attention (or affection, for that matter). Stranger Things, meanwhile, has been projectile vomiting 80s culture at the small screen. Many of these films have been (perhaps rightly) forgotten – but are they forgiven? Hollywood has been busy, of late, failing to rebottle the lightning of the decade’s classics. Among examples leaving the era with their legacies intact, like The Dark Crystal, Boorman’s Excalibur and The Barbarian Schwarzenegger was born to play in Conan, there’s a rogues’ gallery of stylistic failures and xerox copies of better movies. As a result, the films and their concerns became indistinguishable from the MTV, gold-plated toilet, glamour-model aesthetic assimilating everything else.īut strangely, there’s still so much we hate to love about these films. While post-millennium interest in the genre course-corrected with devout attempts to do Fantasy justice by staying true to text (as in the case of Tolkien-by-way-of-Jackson or even Thrones), 80s Fantasy cinema just soaked up the stinking floodwaters. Nothing demonstrated this better than the decade’s dubious love affair with Fantasy cinema. What had been operatic overload with a point in Siegel, Kubrick and Lucas was now stagnant, murky in its message and rubbish strewn. The experimentation and comparable restraint of the American New Wave had crested and crashed, flooding 80s cinema with cheap excess. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good,” Gordan Gekko told us – and we believed him. ![]()
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