Starring: Jan-Michael Vincent, Marilyn Hassett, Chief Dan George, Marianne Jones, Pia Shandel, “Bruno The Bear”

This November, pull up to the proverbial table with your Deuce family as we feast on a Fall-y, folksy fright-flick sure to satisfy your hunger for hoary horrors… and lest some forget the fabled fires which fostered such fetes (as so many loggerheady louts these days do non-too-subtly scurrilously suggest) – so shall the spine-chilling siren shriek of SHADOW OF THE HAWK serve as their just desserts! (KEEE-ah KEEE-ah!)

Big-city boy Mike (Jan-Michael Vincent – henceforth simply: “JMV”) seems to have “it all” – what with his cubicled computer career, chi-chi condo, and cash-stacked hence even chi-chier girlfriend… until his haven’t-seen-in-ten-years tribal medicine man grandad (moviedom’s most recognizable Native face, Chief Dan George) crashes his planned “night-with-the-gang” party with talk of taking his petulant progeny (and a newly-found female-friend reporter with a nose for “news”) on a trek “homeward” – through the oft terrifying Teton-ish Northwest Territory forest… in which JMV’s corporate company-man will be forced to fess up to and face the all-too-familiar fears of familial responsibility… “Familiar” – that is – if your familial fears feature saving the world (??) from the devilish demon Dzunuk’wa and all her dastardly Native sorcery conjurings! Such the likes of: a car that just… disappears! Then reappears at random!! And specters! Snake specters!! Warrior wraiths!! And.. a “rabid bear”!! (KEEE-ah KEEE-ah!)

Fermenting or fomenting from a fever-dreamish story/script by The Deuce’s October pic’s penner/codirector/freak Norman Thaddeus Vane (last month’s THE BLACK ROOM) – thus making a make-shift mini-retrospective… be it vain or in vane.. or, say, an almost Vane – SHADOW OF THE HAWK doesn’t shy away from weirdness!! At once Earthbound and ethereal – the “reality” of its nature-film vistas and setting filtered through an eerie atmospheric haze of head-scratching WTF disregard for logic, explanations, and basic storytelling… A miasma of mishegoss and ghoulishness straddling a Grand Canyon of the earnest and ridiculous – the only tether that of Chief Dan George’s slyly letting on to just how fun this whole hokey-hullabaloo really is… And yet, though buoyed by charisma by the buckets-full, still proved a chasm the seasoned crowd of Times Square’s Cine 42 found too hard to fathom – staying nary a week on its screen before being shuttled off to the outer borough boondocks – to be all but forgotten save some naggingly lingering feeling of unease that crept in unnoticed… Festering and forever fated to be remembered – as will you – SHADOW OF THE HAWK… and its “rabid bear”!! (KEEE-ah KEEE-ah!)