Hawken's Breed

If you want a complete waste of time, because pulling lint out of your belly button or cleaning the wax out of your ears or grouting your tile is your idea of a carnival thrill ride, then you'll not want to miss this one.

For one thing, forget the VHS cover. NO body in this movie looks that attractive (ie, the Indian girl). Someone else commented that whoever posed for the cover is not the same girl and I agree. The cover is THE most exciting thing about this movie.

To put this in perspective, I bought this VHS for 99 cents at K-Mart and three minutes, no, 40 seconds into the movie, I knew I had been ripped off.

I finished watching it because 1) I did pay 99 cents after all and, 2)there might possibly, conceivably been a hair of chance some scene in this turkey was worth more than a pinched loaf.

There wasn't.

Good grief, Fonda. I know you were hard up for roles when you did this, but this is beneath you.

This movie is the reason I no longer rent titles that are unknown to me. This was so poorly done and acted that it appears that it was done in someone's back yard in one afternoon. Video tape jackets are like movie previews, they sure make the movie look good until you see it.

This isn't just a turkey, it's turkeysaurus, mount turkeyest, the turkeyiana trench, turkey t-rex. One of the absolute stinkiest stinkers of all stinkiness. Absolutely unwatchable excepting as a drinking game. Some suggested rules would be every over-exaggerated use of the close-up - take a drink. Every time you physically cringe at how bad Peter Fonda's acting is- take a drink. Every time a gun goes off with no recoil - take a drink. For every awful awful line uttered by Spirit in perfect SATs English that makes you laugh - take a drink.

Drunk is the only way this might be viewable. If you live in California and has a medical prescription, then this should keep you laughing for about two weeks.

It is rare to see a film that achieves the unique distinction of being truly bad in ALL areas: directing, acting, script, make-up, costuming - but Hawken's? It be that bad.

Deserves cult status.

Look no further, this is it, the worst movie ever made. There may be others that are tied, but there are none worse. There can't be.

I found this movie on a clearance-sale laserdisc for $3.25, and thought no movie with those actors could possibly not be worth that price. Turns out it's worth triple that - as the minimum they should have paid me to watch it.

I'm virtually certain that the girl in the picture on the cover of the package is not the girl in the movie, they substituted someone else, someone younger and cuter, to make it look more appealing. Whatever "plot" there was amounted to about three minutes of actual movie, the rest is filler. And I don't mean the kind of filler that you only realize is filler when it's over, or that is some kind of eye candy you don't mind having there, I mean filler that has you thinking about your shopping list. I think the "music" must have been made up by somebody with a friend who had a radio he listened to once. It's terrible.

If there were a shot of a nice mountain, a river valley, a forest, anything, there would be something positive about this movie. There isn't. Even with the speeder button on the remote, even at top laserdisc speed, you can't get it over with fast enough.

After years of thinking about commenting on movies, being tempted but not registering with IMDb, I finally cracked, because I had to do my part to push the user rating on this stinker down as far as possible.

The guidelines ask that you "focus on the content and context". I can't. There isn't enough content to focus on, and that's exactly my point. Sometimes bad is just bad, and this movie would have to be much better than it is to aspire to being only that.

My review was written in February 1990 after watching the movie on Vidmark video cassette.

"Hawken's Breed" is an "Eastern"; a 19th-century tale of frontiersmen set in Tennessee. Minor pic played briefly last fall on its home turf in Nashville and currently is a home video title.

Peter Fonda is comfortably cast as a beaver trapper who falls in love with the beautiful Shawnee girl Serene Hedin. Unfortunately, she already "belongs" to mean trading post owner Jack Elam. A feud erupts when Hawken steals her away.

Atmospherically lensed story is slowly paced, and there is an unfinished quality about the film, which relies too heavily on voice-over to spin the yarn.

Bearded Fonda perfectly fits his role. Character actors Seamon Glass, Elam and Bill Thurman do a fine job building authenticity.