Sean Connery, who has a brilliant filmmaking resume, has also made some terrible blunders throughout his career. This is one of them.

I remember when I first found a Sword of the Valiant DVD many years ago and rented it from my local Blockbuster (when such a thing still existed), because I figured putting Sean Connery in an Arthurian film was brilliant and could not fail. This (and, many years later, First Knight) proved how wrong I was.

Sword of the Valiant is a very, very bad retelling of the famous Gawain & the Green Knight legend. This one was made, presumably, to follow on the modest success of fantasy films like Excalibur and Dragonslayer; people in the 1980s were hungry for good fantasy films, I recall, but special effects of the day weren't quite up to the challenge. (Notably, director Stephen Weeks filmed the same story in 1973's Gawain and the Green Knight, a low-budget movie with a better reception, starring Murray Head as Gawain.)

Certainly the Green Knight was a good choice for basing a screenplay. That said, one must ask why -- in the company of such great thespians as Sean Connery, Peter Cushing and John Rhys-Davies -- the lead for this movie went to someone like Miles O'Keeffe (who, at the time, was best known for providing a backdrop for Bo Derek to get naked in Tarzan the Ape Man). He couldn't even do the voice right, so they cast British actor Peter Firth to overdub his lines.

Our hero wears a He-Man haircut that looked awful and dated when the movie was released and looks even sillier now. His acting is wooden throughout. To make matters worse, the fight choreography is laughably awful, as are the limited special effects. (Wait 'til you see the one where they try to make it appear that Gawain can catch a crossbow bolt in flight.)

King Arthur (Trevor Howard) in this movie is old, petulant and bored. His Round Table isn't round, it's two long dining tables of the sort you'd find in any feasting hall. And he won't let anyone eat their Christmas feast until something wondrous happens. Connery, as the Green Knight, obliges, bursting on horseback into their hall in midriff-baring green and silver armor, a fright wig and sparkly makeup. He demands that someone play his game, trading an axe blow for an axe blow. None of Arthur's knights is brave enough to take the challenge, so the old king says he'll do it himself. That's when Gawain, a squire, says he'll take the dare instead. So he's quickly knighted on the spot, then he chops off the Green Knight's head.

That might have been the end of it, but Greenie's body shambles over, picks up the severed head and puts it back on his shoulders. Then he tells Gawain to meet him in one year to get his blow in return.

And then, the movie happens. Gawain and his squire Humphrey (Leigh Lawson) sort of wonder around for a bit, fighting the Black Knight (Douglas Wilmer), making his way into the magical land of Lyonesse and falling instantly in love with Lady Linet (Cyrielle Claire), becoming a slave in the castle of Baron Fortinbras (John Rhys-Davies) and starting a blood feud with the baron's son Oswald (Ronald Lacey) as his seneschal (Peter Cushing) looks on. There's also a whimsical and thieving friar (Brian Coburn), a mysterious sage (David Rappaport) and, oh yes, Morgan La Fay (Emma Sutton), who just kind of does stuff and gets turned into a frog.

The dialogue is terrible. The antagonists are bewildering and the plot, nonsensical. The film suffers from a brash and jarring soundtrack. The budget is so low they even painted a few of a blacksmith's teeth black to make viewers think he's lost them.

The ending is simply bad, featuring one of the most pitiful battle climaxes I've seen on film.

What a waste of a magnificent story! What a waste of some extremely talented actors! It's just really, really bad. Really.