Without Warning (1980) – Review

It’s truly facinating how echoes of film concepts can drift through the ether and pop up again in a completely different form that still carry the original, basic, genes. I’m not talking about blatantly ripping something off – although that certainly happens – but while the plots of plenty of high concepts movies tend to find their way into low rent copy cats, with Greydon Clark’s grungy 80s sci-fi, Without Warning, it’s curiously the other way round.
Take one lanky alien armed with bizarre weaponry, make him a hunter, throw in an eccentric cast made up of memorable character actors and you basically have the skeletal foundations of John McTiernan’s Predator that was released seven years later. Adding substantially to the deja vu is the fact that the marauding extraterrestrial was played by none other than the late Kevin Peter Hall, the man who would go on to don the mandibles abd dreadlocks of one of the coolest damn creatures in cinema history.
However, this is where the devestating similarities end… it’s time for Predator: The Drunken, Wino, Flop Sweat Edition.

There’s something strange going on as an assortment of folks are going missing in the mountains of the American Midwest. To date (that we know of) the tally stands at a feuding father and son duo who have gone on a hunting trip despite utterly despising one anothet and a bumbling boy scout leade, all of whom have met their ends at the tentacles of weird, toothy, jellyfish looking critters that’s been thrown at them like slimy frisbees of death. The owner of said frisbees turns out to be a gangly, bulbous-headed alien on a hunting trip that’s claiming as many trophies as it can and its next victims seem to be a clutch of horny teens looking for some r&r.
It’s not like they weren’t warned. Creepy truck stop owner Joe Taylor gave them a vague but impassioned heads-up earlier, but in short order, the terrifying trophy hunter has claimed two of their number and stashed their bodies in a remote shack with the rest of his gruesome haul. Fleeing for their lives, the surviving Sandy and Greg go for help, but this is where things start to get a bit more complicated when they stumble back to the truck stop and try to tell the confounded collection of winos about what’s going on.
This stirs up the interest of Fred “Sarge” Dobbs, a war veteran whose grasp of reality has long since gone AWOL due to his harrowing experiences and before you know it, paranoia has him in its clutches as he’s accidently shooting the local sheriff as he’s now convinced the alien prowling the territory can assume human form (it can’t).
Now fleeing from a other worldly killer and a mentally ill veteran who believes they’re part of an alien invasion force, Sandy and Greg’s only hope is the unfeasibly craggy form of Taylor, who actually knows way more about the situation than he’s letting on. Can they survive the night before they succumb to a horrible death by flying, alien jellyfish?

Without Warning is one of those movies that you truly wish was a little better, simply because the core of its original concept is just so damn strong, but as it stands, Clark’s alien opus just feels like basically the type of early 80s movie that looks like it should be playing on a television in the background of other, better 80s movies. Obviously, the central idea of humans being targeted by a big game hunter from outer space was finally done justice to (and then some) the very second we saw the titular creature eyeballing Arnold Schwarzenegger with heat vision in Predator; but there’s admittedly some perverse pleasure in watching such a familiar plot be carried out in such a primitive, campy fashion.
Greydon Clark was a hardly a filmmaker laden down with the burden of restraint as films such as The Uninvited (mutant killer kitty stalks a Kingpin’s boat) and Final Justice (Joe Don Baker plays a cop called Geronimo) certainly attest, but while Without Warning certainly has enough eccentricity enough to keep B-movie junkies happy, I found the thing to be oddly devoid of personality when compared to what a filmmaker such as Larry Cohen could have done with such ruthlessly hokey material. For a start, even for a low budget flick from the early eighties, there is just way too much aimless wandering around in the dark and while it does add to the genuine atmosphere to the piece, I can’t help but think that the movie missed a trick by focusing so much on the terrified teens and not utilising the grizzled bastards back in the truck stop.

Oh, the stunningly flashy casting of none other than Jack Palance and Martin Landau is certainly utilised to its fullest as the two seem locked in a gladitorial battle to the death where their chosen weapon is to milk every single line reading to within an inch of its life. But away from Palance charging at his foe while screaming “AAAAAAALIIIIIEEEEEEEEN!!!” and Landau seeming that he truly is nuttier than a fruitcake, I kind of wanted to see more of Neville Brand’s gravelly barfly and Sue Ane Langdon’s perky barmaid and was hoping Kevin Peter Hall’s Mekon-skulled villain would lay seige to the truck stop which would certainly Neen more interesting than watching two teen wander aimlessly. Still, in addition to the cast I’ve already mentioned, we do also get small roles for comedian Larry Storch, an offensively young David Caruso and the ubiquitous Cameron Mitchell as early victims, but just imagine a movie where it’s the older cast bring stalked as they try to fortify the bar and tell me that doesn’t sound like more fun.
Still, at least the alien’s killing methods are nasty enough as those whizzing, absurd, living throwing stars latch onto their victims and start burrowing little tendrils under the skin while the gnashing teeth get to work. Similarly, it’s interesting that Clark has taken the classic, benign, “grey” look of aliens seen in the likes of Close Encounters and weaponised it into something that looks actually quite striking despite any obvious, budgetary restrictions. Maybe my opinions might have been kinder if I didn’t regard Predator as one of the coolest movies ever to pass in front of my eyeballs, but this is one rare occasion where a rough around the edges B-movie loaded with camp and garnished with a dash of sleaze simply didn’t quite do it for me.

Still, for those who love slumming, overacting character actors, parts of this schlock-fest will take you to nirvana, but despite taking its place as a primitive ancestor of a certified Schwarzenegger classic, for me it simply wasn’t weird enough. If it had dropped the teens we could have had a far trashier flick where most of the fabulously grizzled actors featured look like they’ll have more trouble struggling with the DTs, never mind the ETs.
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