Lord Grade’s ITC gave director Terry Marcel a modest budget of less than a million pounds to throw his hat into the rampant sword-and-sorcery genre of the early 1980s.
Marcel engaged a young square-jawed American unknown called John Terry to play the hero, Hawk, and the ferocious Jack Palance as Hawk’s wicked warlord brother Voltan and then spent six weeks lugging a small team of actors and film technicians back and forth between the black lakes and knotty woodlands of old England and a fake forest at Pinewood Studios.
Hawk is given ‘the magic mind sword’ by his dying father (Ferdy Mayne) with the words “the ancient power must never fall into the hands of the devil’s agents”. He then gathers an intrepid band of helpers and sets off in pursuit of his evil brother.
Voltan
Jack Palance
Hawk
John Terry
Gort the Giant
Bernard Bresslaw
Crow the Elf
Ray Charleson
Baldin the Dwarf
Peter O’Farrell
Ranulf
William Morgan Sheppard
Sorceress
Patricia Quinn
Sister Monica
Cheryl Campbell
Abbess
Annette Crosbie
Eliane
Catriona MacColl
Drogo
Shane Briant
High Abbot
Harry Andrews
Fitzwalter
Christopher Benjamin
Innkeeper
Roy Kinnear
Priest
Patrick Magee
Father of Hawk and Voltan
Ferdy Mayne
Sparrow
Graham Stark
Scar
Warren Clarke
Sped
Declan Mulholland
Ralf
Derrick O’Connor
Black Wizard
Peter Benson
Ferret
Anthony Milner
Brother Peter
Stephen Rayne
Thomas
Ken Parry
Little Nun
Lindsey Brook
Chak
Eddie Stacey
Narrator
Robert Rietty
Director
Terry Marcel
