Hawk The Hunter: What Could Have Been

Terry Marcel, director of Hawk The Slayer, talks with Oliver McNeil, of The Fantasy Podcast and The School of Wizards and Witches, back in 2015, just as it looked as though we might get a sequel (Hawk The Hunter) - with the aid of Kickstarter.

Sadly, as we know, that never happened.

However, the interview also covers the samurai roots of Hawk The Slayer, the film's Easter Eggs, its world's creatures and magic, the casting of Lost's John Terry and Jack Palance, Terry's tantalising plans to take the Hawk brand to television, the Dark Knight TV series, how we almost had Tom Hardy as Hawk back in 2009, and handing over the reins to a younger director.

Ah, those were the days! What could have been...

Honestly, it breaks my heart to hear all these plans and imagine a world where Hawk got the Renaissance it deserves, and we could all be watching a TV show, reading an ongoing comic book series, and even playing video games based upon the most Dungeons & Dragons film of all time.

While we bathe in the warm glow of "what might have been", here also is a selection of interviews that Rebellion conducted with the lovely and optimistic Terry Marcel prior to the launch of the doomed Kickstarter:

Best Westerns of This Decade (So Far)

The Just Westerns YouTube channel shares a breakdown of its top Western films and TV shows released between 2020 and 2025.

There's plenty of great material here to add to your "must watch" list.

HALLOWEEN HORROR: The Watched (2024)

The trailer above, which I saw early last year, got me interested in seeing The Watched (aka The Watchers) and so I had been on the lookout for it ever since.

It finally arrived in Sky Cinema (in the UK), and at first I thought it was delivering on the potential suggested by the teaser trailer.

Dakota Fanning is Mina, a troubled American woman who works in a rare pet store in Galway, and gets lost in an unmapped wood while driving across Ireland to deliver a golden parrot (who she names Darwin) to a client.

Her car breaks down and she finds herself turned round and confused while searching for assistance, eventually being discovered by a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is hiding out in a strange building with a couple of other lost souls, Ciara (Lovely, Dark and Deep's Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan).

Mina quickly discovers that the mysterious woods are home to enigmatic, shapeshifting, supernatural monsters who are holding these people 'prisoner', governed by a strict set of rules, while they study them.

There are attempts to give all this spam-in-a-cabin fodder interesting backstories, but it doesn't really pay off or add much to the drama.

While the quartet are still zoo specimens for "the Watchers", The Watched has strong puzzle box elements - evoking FROM, Lost, and Jordan Peele's Us.

But then it segues rather conveniently into a (comparatively easy) escape sequence and a return to 'normality' that drags on purely just to seed in more - very obvious - plot twists.

There's an unavoidable feeling that a great mythology was dreamed up for the central monsters of the piece, but then a decent story couldn't really be hammered out to contain it. So, instead, we just get streams and streams of exposition as Mina moves from point A to point B, clicks on the right item, gets an info dump and moves on to point C.

While getting lost in scary, magical woods is a trope as old as storytelling, initially The Watched, written and directed by Ishana Shyamalan (daughter of M Night Shyamalan, who is a producer on this project), appeared to taking an interesting (if, probably not wholly original) approach to the subject matter.

Ultimately though it just got bogged down in a mundane and protracted resolution to a mediocre storyline.

YellowBrickRoad (2010)

"One morning in New England, 1940, the entire population of Friar, New Hampshire - 572 people - walked together up a winding mountain trail and into the wilderness. They left behind their clothes, their money, all of their essentials. Even their dogs were abandoned, tied to posts and left to starve.

"No-one knows why. A search party dispatched by the U.S. Army eventually discovered the remains of nearly 300 of Friar's evacuees. Many had frozen to death. Others were cruelly and mysteriously slaughtered. The bodies of the remaining citizens are still unaccounted for.

"Over the years, a quiet cover-up operation managed to weave the story of Friar into the stuff of legends and backwoods fairy tales. The town has slowly repopulated, but the vast wilderness is mostly untracked, with the northern-most stretches off limits to local hunters and loggers.

"In 2008, the coordinates for the "YELLOWBRICKROAD" trail head were declassified. The first official expedition into a dark and twisted wilderness will attempt to solve the mystery of the lost citizens of Friar...and reach the end of the trail."

- plot summary from IMDB.

YellowBrickRoad, from the writing/directing team of Andy Mitton and Jess Holland, is frustratingly close to genius.

The powerful set-up (detailed above) had me hooked from the outset with its Lovecraftian overtones and engaging mystery, and this certainly isn't a movie that spoonfeeds answers to its audience.

I love a good mental challenge as much as the next person and films that don't necessarily spell out everything that's going on, but YellowBrickRoad suffers because - in a similar way to Lost - it is ultimately too obscure and obtuse.

While it is certainly a film that will stay with you as you try to ponder what fate befell the inhabitants of Friar - and the contemporary expedition  - I don't believe there are actually enough clues to adequately fill in the gaps.

As the the research team - which includes Smallville's Cassidy Freeman and her brother Clark Freeman (they also executive produced the movie) - get further up the trail, and into the mountains, they hear spectral 1940s music from ahead of them, which gets louder as they head north.

The sounds come and go as the journey progresses, but it appears to be having strange effects on some of the group, including memory loss, increased tension and confusion.

The unnerving suggestion that fixed points, directions and co-ordinates change depending on which way you are heading is the genuine stuff of nightmares.

The cinematography and audio effects are superb, although the editing and direction is occasionally jumpy (this, however, may be a deliberate ploy to heighten the hallucinogenic effects of the trail), that if nothing else makes this a gorgeous horror film to experience (I can only imagine how awesome some sequences - such as the auditory assault on the senses - would have been in a cinema).

We can easily pick up on the effects the music - and possibly even the environment - is having on the walkers, as well as clues such as the co-ordinates of the trailhead, the worn copy of the Wizard Of Oz in the town's picture house, the fact that people in the 1940s sought escape in the cinema etc., which kind of tie-in with the bizarre, rather leftfield ending, but there isn't enough indication of either the 'how' or 'why' to put together our own theories of what is going on.

I think I picked up on all the other Wizard Of Oz references - the scarecrow scene is particularly horrific and well done, but I wish there had been more moments like that (did I miss the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Man?).

Not that I necessarily wanted more gore. Great horror can unsettle you by mere suggestion alone (cf. The Haunting) and YellowBrickRoad does do a lot of creepy stuff with its sound effects and surreal disorientation but I think the film was simply too big, too ambitious, for its makers and got away from them in the end.

Stylistically, and thematically, YellowBrickRoad reminded me of two of my favourite horrors - The Blair Witch Project (although thankfully this isn't another 'found footage' movie) and In The Mouth Of Madness - and for the majority its 96 minute run I was convinced that YellowBrickRoad would be joining these two in the ranks of my personal greats.

Then it doesn't so much as fall apart at the end (as I can see where the story was trying to go, with the brief flash of the ghostly images etc) as simply come to a hurried conclusion.

During the build-up I found myself so engrossed in the on-screen developments that I didn't want the film to end and when it did, it did it in a most unsatisfactory, and slightly messed-up, way.

We were left with too many unanswered questions and not even a general suggestion as to where we might find answers.

Yet, for all its faults I can certainly see myself revisiting YellowBrickRoad, just to see if I missed any clues along the way, even though I'm totally convinced I'm never going to get all the answers I'm looking for.

Part of the frustration with this film is that, if you let it, it can really get under your skin. Like it or not, you are not going to forget your journey on the YellowBrickRoad in a hurry.

The Burrowers (2008)

Two families of settlers are snatched in the Dakota Territories, the badlands beyond civilization in the 1879 wild west - including the sweetheart of ranch hand Fergus Coffey (Karl Geary).

The blame is immediately put upon hostile Indians and a posse sets out, led by veteran Indian fighters Will Parcher (Lost's William Mapother) and John Clay (Carnivàle's Clancy Brown). For a while they team up with a group of cavalrymen, but eventually strike out of their own when they hear that a tribe called "The Burrowers" are to blame.

Only, in time, they discover to their cost, that "The Burrowers" are not a tribe of Native Americans; they're not even human.

The Burrowers, written and directed by JT Petty, is a tense and engrossing Western horror, making use of the varied terrain and the circumstances - and prejudices - of the late 19th Century to sow the seeds of confusion and mistrust within the various groups.

The critters themselves are simply part of the natural food chain, driven to hunt fresh prey after the white men killed off their traditional source of food: the buffalo.

Slick cinematography, naturalistic performances and creepy monster effects (no CGI here - all puppets, model work and rubbery costumes, but the verisimilitude is never broken), help make this a top class creature feature with the added bonus of a period setting.