Raven Hawk (1996)

This is one I've been meaning to get for years. For the longest time, there was only a foreign language dub version on YouTube. Sometime last year there was an English-language version, but before I had a chance to review it, it was taken down. Then recently Kevin Hazell reached out on the Facebook page and mentioned a YouTube account, The Movie Man, that had a bunch of stuff uploaded. When I started paging through, I noticed some Pyun flicks, and thought this might be it, and sure enough, there it was. In addition to us, Bulletproof Action and RobotGEEK's Cult cinema have covered this, plus Ty from Comeuppance posted a sweet VHS of this on his Instagram page.

Raven Hawk has Rachel McLish as a woman who, as a girl, is framed for her parents' murders by some corrupt developers who want to install a nuclear waste disposal site on Native American land. After spending twelve years in a mental institution, while being transported to a prison, her van flips and she survives. Now free, she's out for revenge, ready to kill those responsible. At the same time, John Enos III is a reservation police officer investigating her murders. He knows there's more going on here. But the baddies aren't going down without a fight either. They've called in a crew of Pyun mainstays to take her down. Will she be victorious?

This is pretty close to pure Pyun, in that we have a strong female protagonist, who is also a woman of color, ready to take down a bunch of bad guys. I read in the IMDb trivia that he wanted to play up McLish's character's mystical and emotional aspects more, while the producers wanted something more like a female Rambo, so they took it away and made it more of what we got. I liked it as a straight-ahead revenge actioner, but I also see what Pyun was thinking too--why make it in the tradition of the white male protagonist, when you have a female Native American hero you can do more with it. At the very least it would've been interesting to see that, but this worked for me, and I think the amount that Pyun was able to influence it made it work. McLish is great as the hero, and I liked too that there were no damsel in distress moments, no male hero like John Enos III's character coming to save her. It's shame that out of all of Pyun's movies, this is one of the tougher ones to find, because I think it's one of his better ones.

This is the 44th film for Pyun here at the DTVC, but as a director it's number 42--we did Mean Guns twice, which is how he has 45 tags, plus Nemesis 5, which he produced, and then Dollman vs. Demonic Toys where archive footage that he directed in Dollman was used. 42 puts him a good 27 ahead of the director with the second-most director tags here, Fred Olen Ray, who has 15. Looking at what we have left for him, there's Left for Dead--which I discovered is free on Vudu right now, so I need to do that soon!--, Cool Air, and then two I'm having trouble getting, The Interrogation of Cheryl Cooper and Interstellar Civil War: Shadows of the Empire, so that plus his producer credit on the Ray-directed Final Examination would get Pyun close to the 50 Club. If that's the case, that he's one away, maybe we count that second Mean Guns review just to get him in there. One of the best DTV directors ever, and this movie is a great one of his.

 

We'll cut to the chase and get right to our favorite game: who are the Pyun mainstays in this? In this case, all three were tapped by Pyun to be the team of mercenaries called in by the baddies to take McLish down. We start with DTVC favorite Vincent Klyn. Back off Warchild, seriously. He plays a Maori warrior, complete with accent. He's at 19 films here at the DTVC, which is huge for a guy who plays a lot of supporting roles, and puts him now one ahead of fellow Pyun mainstay Norbert Weisser, who was tied with him for 18. Next we have Thom Matthews. That's 12 for him, and while this is a pretty pedestrian performance as Matthews goes, it was good that Pyun got him in this. Same with Nicholas Guest, who is now at 10 movies on the site. Other than Klyn, who would be tagged because he's Warchild--seriously--the others only have tags and the volume of posts on the site because of Pyun. I thought the late Ed Lauter, who is in this as a sheriff, had done more Pyun too, but this is the only film they did together. Same with Mitchell Ryan, who plays Enos's boss.

Rachel McLish did not make a lot of movies, and according to the IMDb trivia, she credits that with her changing her mind about a nude scene Pyun wanted her to do when she's going through a ritual of spiritual transcendence. Eventually she agreed to be topless for it. Honestly, in watching the scene, I don't know that she needed to be nude for it, no matter what the reason. She was a great action lead, and if that was the reason why directors didn't want to work with her, or if it turned her off from the business, that's too bad. I was trying to think how many of Pyun's female protagonists had nude scenes, and one that comes to mind is Victoria Maurette in Bulletface, which was more a series of disjointed scenes in a prison rape sequence. Maybe that's what Pyun wanted to do here as well, not fully show McLish's nude body, but cut and mix things so the focus wasn't on her nudity, but the spirituality. By the same token, if McLish felt uncomfortable with it she felt uncomfortable with it, and could she really trust that what Pyun wanted to do was what would've been the end product, especially since the film was taken from him by the producers?

 

Finally, we have a Star Trek: The Next Generation sighting in John de Lancie--who, unlike Lauter and Ryan, had worked with Pyun before this, in Arcade. In addition to Arcade, he was also in an indie flick we reviewed, Cloned, making this 3 tags for him. For TNG alums, he's one behind Michael Dorn, who has 4 tags. In this he plays a senator who's pulling all the strings, kind of Q-ish actually. Two things I didn't know about him: he's from Philadelphia, and he was born in the late 40s. About the latter, I liked that for the new Picard series they didn't do like they did with Mark Hamill in The Mandalorian and use a computer image of his face to make him look younger. De Lancie played one of my favorite sci-fi characters of all time, and I think a big part of why I loved him so much was de Lancie's performance, so any time I can spotlight him on the site I want to.

And with that, let's wrap this up. As of right now, this can be streamed on YouTube, or bought used on VHS. I think there may also be DVDs outside the USA region. The thing is, this was released here in the States on HBO first, so if they have it, why not put it on HBOMax? They have Collision Course, this wouldn't be too far of a stretch beyond that. A guy can dream, right?

For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117446

And if you haven't yet, check out my new novel, A Girl and a Gun, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!