A cross between sword-and-sorcery and The Black Shield of Falworth, this is a laborious adventure fantasy set in a medieval France where an evil bishop (John Wood) has cursed lovers Rutger Hauer and Michelle Pfeiffer - the blondest, bluest-eyed combo since Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake - so that the one may turn into a wolf at night and the other into a hawk by day. Magnificent, imaginative set decoration and art direction, full of fires and torches against primeval battlements, and amazing sewer systems, are wasted here on a fatuous script and foolish story. The playing is surprisingly indifferent considering the cast, save for another whiskey priest from Leo McKern, and the action too frenziedly edited to set the pulses racing. The hawk and the wolf (or husky, or whatever), however, are both splendid - easily the most attractive things in a film whose modern English, often half-addressed to the camera, sits uneasily on its medieval characters' shoulders.

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