Hawken's Breed

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.

Westerns were really out of fashion when director Charles B. Pierce made this one, so you have to admire him for putting so much effort into making it. Unfortunately, that's about the nicest thing I can say about "Hawken's Breed". The other user comments who wrote negative things about this movie were right about its bad quality. It's as slow as molasses, with most of what happens in the first half being completely unnecessary, except maybe to pad out the very thin story. The movie also shows some signs that it was a troubled production, with excessive use of narration used to try and explain things (and sometimes contradicting what we see and hear from the characters!) Even Guido and Maurizio De Angelis (what are they doing on an American film?) can't liven things up with their musical score, which is far from their best work. If there is anything else positive to say about the movie besides trying to resurrect a dead genre, it's that it provided work for Peter Fonda during a lean period for him.

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.

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.

I couldn't wait for the end. This is absolutely the worst film I have ever seen. If you thought that just about anyone could make a watchable movie, these folks prove that there is a minimum skill set required. This is a film with no redeeming features whatsoever. It scores a zero in every department. This is more than just 'amateur' as the audience is given no consideration or regard at all. There is no serious attempt to act or entertain. The storyline is aimless, pointless and senseless. The cast look very uncomfortable and completely lack direction. The technical aspects of the film are poor.

As a DVD it makes a good drinks coaster.