Not The Slayer, Nor The Hunter, Just Hawk

Hawk from CAPTURE on Vimeo.

The land holds many secrets, and one boy will learn them all.

When Rowan is taken away from the civilised world, his lessons in the wild begin.

Yet when he shatters the balance of nature, Rowan discovers another world beneath our own.

In that shadowy land of old gods and wild hunts, the divide between man and beast becomes uncertain and the fairy tales of childhood spring to life.

With only the guidance of a hunting hawk, Rowan must make amends for his crime, and choose between what is real, and what is not.

Since it's release in 2011, Hawk has picked up over 14 international award nominations, with 6 wins including ones at the Accolade Competition, TOHorror Film Festival, ShockerFest and Idyllwild Cinemafest.

Writer/director M.J. McMahon's 40-minute short film Hawk was the last onscreen appearance of the late Philip Madoc of classic Doctor Who fame (as well as many other credits to his name, stretching back to the early 1960s).

Although it has no connection with my favourite Dungeons & Dragons movie, I first came across mention of this enigmatic entry in the annals of fantasy cinema on the Official Hawk The Slayer Facebook Group.

I suspect it will possibly be a triumph of atmosphere over story (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but look out for a review in due course.

Introducing Toph Beifong To The Last Airbender

The cast and creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender explain how Season Two brought Toph Beifong to life.

The Final Programme (1973)

We may still be waiting (optimistically) for a live-action Elric movie, but another aspect of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion found his way into the movies in The Final Programme.

Although set in the "far future" during the slow death throes of civilization, this wonderful film is cut from the same cloth as such '70s spy-fi fare as The Prisoner, The Avengers, Jason King and even Doctor Who.

Written, designed and directed by Robert Fuest (of Dr Phibes fame, but has he also directed some episodes of The Avengers back in the late '60s), The Final Programme (also known as The Last Days Of Man On Earth) is mesmerizing in its psychedelic weirdness, yet not to the extent that the story is lost to the visuals.

The story revolves around biscuit-obsessed Nobel Prize-winning physicist and playboy adventurer Jerry Cornelius (Jon Finch) who is approached by a team of scientists, fronted by the sultry and possibly not-quite-human Miss Brunner (Jenny Runacre), to retrieve some key microfilm from the vaults of his recently deceased father's mansion.

It so happens that Jerry was planning to go there anyway as he wanted to rescue his sister Catherine (an all too brief cameo by Sarah Douglas) from the clutches of his dangerous, drug-addicted brother Frank (Derrick O'Connor).

The microfilm contains the key to a scientific formula that could save mankind, by kickstarting the next stage of evolution as an hermaphroditic, self-replicating, immortal human being. Unfortunately, there is still one ingredient missing...

For my money, this film was pure Moorcock, especially the non-traditional climax which these days would have had people crying out for a sequel but in the good old days was left suitably open and provocative.

The story embraces its bonkers' excesses, but as I said above it doesn't let this wash away the central storyline of the piece as happens all too often is such outré movies.

It certainly helps that the two central performers - the amazing Jenny Runacre and the suave Jon Finch - are so charismatic, with Finch's Cornelius almost certainly being an inspiration for Austin Powers.

As well as Sarah Douglas's brief appearance, the eagle-eyed - and eared - will also spot future star (and mother of Georgia Moffett, David Tennant's wife) Sandra Dickinson in her first big screen role, as a waitress in a mud-wrestling-themed restaurant.

While Moorcock himself was not a fan of Fuest's take on the story, he praised Finch for his portrayal of Jerry Cornelius during an interview at the BFI about the movie in 2010.

Taking A 'Different' Approach to Iconic British Folk Hero

From writer/director Michael Sarnoski and starring Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett and Noah Jupe. The Death of Robin Hood, in theaters June 19.

Noah (2014)

Although I'm not a religious person, I've always had a soft spot for film's based on Biblical stories for some reason, but Noah is the closest yet to crossing over into my usual playground of epic fantasy or science-fiction.

While I haven't really studied the Great Flood myth, I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered rock giants (fallen angels bound to the Earth by rock and mud, resembling elemental creatures from The Neverending Story or The Hobbit) helping Noah build his Ark.

Darren Aronofsky's take on the story certainly owes as much to Tolkien as it does The Bible - occasionally even straying into B-movie sword-and-sorcery territory - with its surfeit of magical items and mysticism.

Russell Crowe plays a surprisingly misanthropic and nihilistic Noah, a vegetarian action hero who believes The Creator wants to wipe all humanity from the planet and his job, and that of his family, is purely to shepherd all the animals to the new, post-Flood world and then die out, so the innocent animals can run free.

Noah has visions of The Creator's genocidal plans to obliterate his failed experiment from the Earth - like a child with an Etch-A-Sketch shaking his messed-up picture into oblivion so he can start again from scratch - and so sets about building the Ark, to preserve the creatures of the land and air (the fish have to make their own arrangements).

However, having grown a forest from a seed left over from The Garden Of Eden and recruited the rock giants to help with the Ark building, Noah attracts the attention of local warlord and one-dimensional bad guy Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone), who decides he's going to take the Ark to save his meat-eating people (they believe they gain 'strength' from eating the flesh of animals) from the coming deluge.

Naturally Noah and the giants have something to say about this.

Along for the ride are Noah's wife, Naameh (Jennifer Connelly), his sons Shem (Douglas Booth), Ham (Logan Lerman) and Japheth (Leo McHugh Carroll) and Shem's lady-friend, Ila (Emma Watson), who is barren until magically cured by Noah's grandfather Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins).

Noah's kids quickly realise that their dreams of repopulating the Earth after the Flood are slightly flawed as the men outnumber the women in their group and the only women are their mum and Ila, who is - at that point - infertile.

What passes for a romantic sub-plot essentially involves Ham running into the nearby community, grabbing the first woman he meets - a girl called Na'el (Madison Davenport) - and deciding she'll do for a wife (still a better love story than Twilight, though).

As a brief aside, I can't help but guess that whatever Tubal-cain's followers were getting up to must have been some really nasty stuff if the Creator was so determined to wipe them all off the face of the Earth, but is totally okay with what's happening here at the moment (e.g. Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, the continued rise of the Right in Western nations etc)

Once the Flood comes, Tubal-cain stows away on the Ark for the better part of nine months (again, I don't remember this from Sunday School), with the aid of Ham, surviving on an all-you-can-eat buffet of slumbering animals (presumably he ate the unicorns, dinosaurs, dragons etc and those cute armadillo/dog creatures that we saw early on in the movie).

There's a lot that isn't explained in Noah (and perhaps that's not a bad thing, actually). For instance, the TARDIS-like capacity of the Ark to hold two of every species is hand-waved (perhaps, as they were all sleeping, Noah's brood stacked them neatly like containers in a warehouse) and I don't get why the sloughed skin of The Serpent from the Garden Of Eden is an artefact for Good?

And when you look at the surviving unit of humanity at the end of movie: just who is going to father future generations and repopulate the planet, anyway (without getting into icky, incestuous inbreeding territory)?

Conversely there are some clever ideas in there, such as the Flood waters rising out of the Earth, which kind of circumvents the physical impossibility of sea levels rising to such a degree all around the world - and presumably that was where the water returned to, when the Floods receded.

But for all my ribbing of the various plot holes (many of which, of course, are carried over from the source material anyway), Noah is an impressive feat of movie making,  a powerful and engaging film even if you are not of a religious bent.

Aronofsky has brought his usual visual eye to the story giving it an epic, fantastical feel that (almost) transcends its specific religious origins (The Flood myth is found in many early cultures anyway and the ark probably has its origins in Babylonian stories that pre-date the Bible).

I don't know Aronofsky's personal views on religion, but Noah manages to be thought-provoking but not preachy with Noah himself being a complex and interesting character, of a far darker temperament than you might expect, channelling some mighty Old Testament fury not normally associated with the builder of the Ark.

WALL OF HAWK!

For my birthday in 2019, Rachel agreed to pay for my two original Hawk The Slayer posters to be framed professionally.

The following January they went up (thanks to Rachel's dad) in the gamesroom, and I couldn't be happier.

The top one is a quad poster that would have been displayed outside a cinema, while beneath that is an official art print that was produced to coincide with the launch of the (sadly failed) 2015 Kickstarter to fund the sequel, Hawk The Hunter.

It's signed by Hawk's co-creator and director of the 1980's original movie, Terry Marcel.

Then beneath that I have a signed picture of Annette Crosbie as the Abbess, and a stock publicity picture of the legendary Jack Palance as Voltan.

Blades of The Guardians Trailer Delivers Peak Wuxia Action

Legendary action master Yuen Woo-ping brings together martial arts icons Wu Jing, Nicholas Tse, Max Zhang, and Jet Li on an epic wuxia adventure across the desert sands.

Bounty hunter Doa Ma takes a job escorting the empire’s most wanted man, Zhi Shi Lang, to Chang’an city. As word gets out, his group is hunted down by warriors across the land. The chase is relentless, the action is non-stop, and the blades cut deep.

Available on Digital June 30, own it on 4K, Blu-ray & DVD August 25 [in the US].

Jabberwocky (1977)

A Dark Age kingdom is being terrorised by a mysterious monster, driving much of its populace to seek shelter behind the walls of the main city.

Eventually doddery, old King Bruno the Questionable (comedy legend Max Wall) decides to organise a brutal jousting tournament to find "a champion" to slay the beast.

This is despite appeals by his equally aged Chancellor, Passelewe (the always excellent John Le Mesurier of Dad's Army and the Hitchhiker's Guide to The Galaxy radio plays) who would rather the search was conducted in such a way as to not keep killing off the land's knights.

Meanwhile, upon the death of his father, clueless and clumsy Dennis Cooper (future national treasure Michael Palin) decides to leave the village where he grew up and move to the city, to start afresh.

This leads to a series of chaotic, often slapstick, set-pieces as he bumbles his way through every encounter from trying to get into the city to being mistaken for a prince-in-disguise by Bruno's daughter, the princess (Deborah Fallender).

Her hand-in-marriage and half the kingdom are being offered by the king to whoever kills the troublesome monster.

After his only friend, Ethel the lusty squire (Steptoe and Son's Harry H. Corbett), is accidentally killed, Dennis ends up as the squire to the eventual champion of the joust, Red Herring (Dave Prowse aka Darth Vader), and the two brave men set out into the mist-dappled lands, looking for the fearful monster.

However, the church and the rich merchant-nobles of the city aren't so keen to see the creature murdered because it is surprisingly good for business, as people are buying and praying more.

Therefore, they engineer an ambush by the Black Knight (also Dave Prowse), and his small gang of thugs, to take out Red Herring - and Dennis - before they actually reach the monster's lair.

I can't believe I was halfway through my sixtieth cycle around the sun before I made time to see Jabberwocky, a wonderfully, very British, dark comedy with smatterings of gory Grand Guignol.

While strictly not a Monty Python movie, it is written and directed by Terry Gilliam, stars Michael Palin and features several Python regular collaborators, as well as a host of British comedy faces of the era.

There's also the visual, grimy Medieval verisimilitude of 1975's Monty Python and The Holy Grail (which Gilliam co-directed) and a similar picaresque throughline to 1979's Life of Brian.

The monster - which may be the Jabberwocky of the title, but is never directly called that - remains unseen until the climax, with Gilliam instead employing canny, low-budget camera techniques as would be used in Sam Raimi's 1981 Evil Dead (and then the rest of that gore-drenched franchise).

Once we finally see it, the Jabberwocky (a man in a costume) is more Classic Doctor Who era alien than glorious Sir John Tenniel illustration, but that just heightens the surreal craziness of the film.

The film's title, and monster's possible name, comes, of course, from the famous nonsense poem in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There.

Snatches of the poem are heard, Greek Chorus-like, throughout the film, recited by an unseen - and unidentified - Punch and Judy puppeteer, heightening the mythological - or fairy tale - nature of the adventure.

Ultimately, the 105-minute Jabberwocky may not be as laugh-out-loud funny as much of Gilliam's other work, but it still manages to be subversive and smart behind its veneer of blood, guts, and toilet humour.

Horror's Heating Up In Evil Dead Burn Taster

START OF A NEW FEATURE: Tim Does Film Posters!

Cheers to your family... your perfect flesh and blood. 🔥🔥🔥

Watch this new clip from Evil Dead Burn, only in cinemas July 10.

Evil Dead Burn unleashes the franchise’s most savage and terrifying ride to date, blazing onto big screens with an all-new chapter of carnage and demonic mayhem.

After the loss of her husband, a woman seeks solace with her in-laws in their secluded family home. 

As one by one they are transformed into Deadites - turning the gathering into a family reunion from hell - she comes to discover that the vows she took in life... live on even in death.