Let us talk about Hawk the Slayer.
Back in the 80s, before we had bottom-budget SyFy channel movies, we had bottom-budget sword and sorcery. Hawk takes place in a primordial past where good guys and bad guys have a lot of random encounters in the woods. They’re all just out there, in some totally random spot in the forest, burning a witch or having reckless ax-throwing contests.
The titular character, Hawk the Slayer, is heir to a kingdom or something, but he spends most of his time wandering around with an elven mind-sword.
It has a hand on the handle that glows!
Meanwhile, his brother, Jack Palance, who appears to be at least thirty years older than him (and slightly older than their mutual father who I guess was a king or something), is out conquering the land with an army of less than a dozen extras. Here we see Jack Palance as he screams "My acting is this big!"
There’s some monks in this world, who are possibly Christian, but it’s not clear. They live in badly painted fantasy fan art.
The supporting characters are really what makes the movie. There’s a blindfolded witch with the ability to bend time and space, who is nevertheless nearly burned to death by a couple of rubes with whips. The other characters just call her "woman". They can do this because every other female in the movie is either a nun or dead, or both. Keep that in mind for future reference, the primary character archetypes for women are witch, nun, and dead.
The other members of the merry band are a giant who’s about six-foot-four, a dwarf who’s about five-foot-three, and an elf with relatively high cheekbones. If I was at a party I might think that the giant and the dwarf had an impressive size difference, but in a movie it just looks like the casting agent was taking the day off.
