aka: The Warning; It Came Without Warning

 

 

(1980)

 

 Produced and Directed by Greydon Clark

 Starring: Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson, Cameron Mitchell

 

Reviewed by Michael Bolvary

 

    There are certain films you see at a young, impressionable age that leave a lasting effect when they normally wouldn't at any other time.  I'm sure all horror fans have their stories.  A gorehound friend of mine recently recalled being scared out of his wits when he saw Damiano Damiani's Amityville II: The Possession as a child.  Taking this as a recommendation, I watched the film and was not particularly impressed.  Despite being well made, well photographed and embellished with creepy atmosphere and a few good scares, I ultimately found it rather hackneyed and predictable.  However, I could easily understand how it could have scared him when he was younger and not an older, more experienced horror film enthusiast, because as a child I had been thoroughly creeped out by a mediocre low-budget sci-fi/horror thriller called Without Warning.

    It was sometime in the mid-1980s, so I couldn't have been more than six or seven and not very knowledgeable of the genre.  My love for horror wouldn't begin in earnest until the late 1980s, when I saw films like Halloween, Night of the Living Dead and David Cronenberg's The Fly on TV.  But back when I was six or seven, I wasn't watching anything scarier than old reruns of The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

    While visiting some relatives up north, they let me stay up past my bedtime to watch a late-night horror movie.  It took place in the woods and was about people being stalked and killed by some weird alien from space who threw flying flat things that attached themselves to people and sucked out their blood.  The bodies were stored in an isolated cabin, and I remember the scenes of the mutilated victims (eyes gouged out, flesh peeled away) very well.  I couldn't recall following the story in great detail, but I sure remembered the creepy atmosphere and violence that seemed quite graphic to me at the time.  I was shaken by the film, though I seem to recall my older relatives being rather underwhelmed and at times bored.

    "What was that movie?" I asked.

    "Without Warning," my cousin replied, reading it from the TV guide.

    Without Warning.... That title stuck with me, and I recently decided to go on a trip down memory lane and watch the film again, for the first time in twenty years, with older, wiser, much more experienced eyes. Would it still scare me?  Would it rekindle the same creepy feelings that it did before?

    Let's just say that after watching it again, I could understand how my older relatives felt.  

    Without Warning is a thoroughly mediocre, unremarkable, unambitious sci-fi/horror potboiler that offers nothing particularly new or interesting.  The film was written by four writers: Lyn Freeman, Daniel Grodnik, Steve Mathis and Ben Nott.  Did it need any writers at all?  The story is an absolutely standard, assembly-line product, recycled from countless other films of the period.  The plot goes through all the cliches of the genre as if the writers were going through a checklist: A couple of hunters get picked off by the creature in the woods just for starters (killing off Cameron Mitchell, probably the most respectable actor in the whole film); we get introduced to the requisite bunch of vacationing teenage jerks and bimbos; they are warned away by gas station owner Joe Taylor (Jack Palance); they go into the woods anyway; two of them are picked off by the alien's flying flat things (I'll call them fleshsuckers, for lack of a better word) and the other two spend the rest of the movie running around trying to get people to help them.  Eventually the alien gets blown up real good by Taylor's high explosives, but we're reminded that "space is so vast and unknowable that more aliens may come again someday,  blah, blah, blah...."

    If you were to replace the alien with a masked serial killer and the flying fleshsuckers with an array of sharp weapons, then Without Warning would just be the umpteenth Friday the 13th ripoff.

    A film like this is so predictable in its plot that it could only pass if it had stylish, energetic direction and photography, appealing performances or at least some gratuitous blood and gore.  Unfortunately, Without Warning lacks most of that.  Greydon Clark's dull, pedestrian direction almost ruins the chills produced by Dan Wyman's eerie music and the effective photography of Dean Cundey--John Carpenter's best cinematographer almost makes the woods look as sinister and foreboding as Halloween's Haddonfield, or The Thing's Antarctica.

    Any suspense or credibility in the story is immediately banished whenever any of the cast members appear: as Sandy and Greg, the leading couple, Tarah Nutter and Christopher S. Nelson have little chemistry, and while they are able to convey a sense of fear and panic, their scenes are completely offset by the embarrassing ham acting of Jack Palance and (especially) Martin Landau.  Palance is a wild-eyed gung-ho fighter who wants to help the kids kill the creature, but he mostly just makes a fool of himself, running around with his guns and explosives.  Martin Landau, as a crazy, paranoid Vietnam vet named Jack Dobbs, comes off as someone who's watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers too many times:  "I knew this was coming!  I told everyone the aliens would come someday, but nobody ever listened!"  At one point, he becomes convinced that the kids are pod people who have been replaced by aliens.  In a scene impossible not to laugh at, Greg and Sandy actually decide to play along with him and pretend to really be human replacements, describing their plan to take over the planet: "Your Earth is divided into many countries.  In America, we anticipated the most resistance from you humans...."  When the alien finally flings some of his fleshsuckers at Landau,killing him off, it's a blessing for the viewer as much as for the remaining characters.

    The fleshsuckers (clearly modeled after the facehuggers in Alien), are memorably messy: they look like small, rotten pizzas and when they attach themselves to people they extend sharp pincers which penetrate the victim's clothes, hook into the flesh and suck away like a space jellyfish.  The fleshsuckers are pretty gross, but since they make sounds like a bunch of hyperactive crickets and fly through the air like they're suspended from fishing rods, they're ultimately more funny than scary.  (I was hoping one of the fleshsuckers would hit someone in the crotch, but no such luck.) 

    The alien hunter is the most effective character in the film.  It doesn't do much besides walk around, stand still, and throw the flying fleshsuckers at his prey, but the alien is memorable nonetheless.  All the reviews of this film say the alien looks like an Outer Limits reject, but I think  it looks like a tall, thin copy of the creature from "The Corbomite Maneuver" episode of the 1960s Star Trek series.  The alien was portrayed by none other than the late Kevin Peter Hall; his untimely death in 1991 robbed the cinema of one of the most talented creature performers ever.  He had played a number of memorable aliens in a succession of films, most notably 1987's Predator--a film that takes Without Warning's premise and makes it much more stylish, suspenseful and successful.  Watch that film again instead of this one.

    Back in 1980, a film like Without Warning may have been moderately effective, but the story, characters, and makeup effects have dated badly, and there's hardly anything left to recommend it.  I really wanted to like this film, hoping it would scare me the same way that it had scared me as a child, but I've long since outgrown it.  Why didn't it seem as creepy as it did all those years ago?  I guess nostalgia isn't what it used to be....

 

    2 BITCH SLAPS

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