I’ve watched a lot, and I do mean a LOT of bad movies in the last few years, and some of these movies are so much fun and were made with such love and sincerity that I will unironically never forget them for the rest of my life. They’re almost like happy memories. They bring joy, just thinking about them. Then there’s movies like Without Warning, where I watched it about a week ago and forgot every single solitary thing about it within a day and had to re-watch the whole stupid mess again just to write this review. Yeah, it’s that kind of movie.
Without Warning was directed by Greydon Clark, who made quite a few Bad Movie Monday worthy titles like “Wacko”, “The Return”, “Joysticks” and “Satan’s Cheerleaders”. He’s not an untalented director to be honest, but he makes films like he’s a blue collar schlub fixing a toilet. It’s obvious that, to him, this is just one gig out of many. He shows up, does his job as best as he can, and then moves on to the next gig. He’s always professional, but he’s not going to wow you with some hitherto unknown cinematic technique. He seems like one of those old school Hollywood guys that, had you asked him, would probably have told you he works in the pictures.
WHAT’S THE STORY?
It’s a slasher movie version of Predator, with a little bit of First Blood thrown into the mix for good measure, that takes place in the woods around Santa Monica. That’s pretty much it. Normally, this would be unremarkable except for the fact that Without Warning was made seven years before Predator and two years before First Blood. So, I’m giving the movie a hundred points for having original ideas but deducting about a million for having the worst possible version of those ideas.
The film stars Martin Landau as a mentally ill war veteran that’s been telling people about aliens and alien invasions for years, and Jack Palance as a world weary gas station owner whose hunting instincts might be more than a match for the alien. Kevin Peter Hall plays the Alien, the little bit of it that we see, although there’s no hint of his later performance as the Predator in John McTiernan’s far superior film. There’s also a young David Caruso as one of the four unlucky teens that crosses paths with the alien, and a vastly underutilized Cameron Mitchell as a nameless character who becomes the alien’s first kill.
The problem with movies like this is that, more often than not, they’re a victim of low budgets, last minute changes, and a shooting schedule that’s so tight that it gives you no room to improvise or fix any problems that occur. I don’t know what happened, and I won’t hazard a guess, but some sort of disaster befell production because this movie has no third act and feels as rudderless as a ship lost at sea with nary a gust of wind to be found. The film also feels backwards. Normally, with your standard slasher film, there may be a kill early on, but then you build up your cast and introduce side characters as the slasher preys on them. Here, the alien kills almost everyone within the first forty minutes and we’re left with no one except Palance, Landau and two of the teenagers. So we spend the rest of the film dealing with Landau’s paranoia as he believes that the alien is a shape shifter that can imitate its victims as camouflage. This plot point goes nowhere, since Landau is obviously insane, but it also almost feels like the movie might have originally envisioned this. Because why else would you hire Cameron Mitchell if not to play the alien in human form?
TEN THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MOVIE:
#1 – I rather like the movie’s look. I have a thing for the early 80s cinema aesthetic, which was an evolution of the 70s aesthetic with lots of earth tones and film grain and the utilization of light and darkness. Then again, the director of photography was Dean Cundey. So it was kind of impossible for it to look bad. Cundey, if you didn’t know, worked as DP on some of the greatest John Carpenter films: The Fog, Escape From New York, The Thing, and the first three Halloween movies.
#2 – The soundtrack’s not bad. It’s nothing super special, but it meshes well with the movie. Again, we have a John Carpenter collaborator: Dan Wyman. He was the orchestrator on Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Fog. So visually and sonically, we’re in good hands.
#3 – How do you hire Cameron Mitchell and then barely put him in your film? The most unforgivable of the film’s flaws is killing his character off about six minutes into it. Yes, I know he could be a huge pain in the ass, but if you can deal with Jack Palance and Martin Landau’s “eccentricities” then you can deal with Cameron Mitchell.
#4 – That said, I honestly can’t tell if Cameron Mitchell’s playing the part of a deranged hunter or if they just gave him a shotgun and a hat and told him to be himself.
#5 – Jesus, I just realized that I look exactly like Martin Landau’s character in this movie. I even dress like him, have the same haircut, and am the same age.
#6 – Early on, the film shows us that Jack Palance’s character is an avid hunter with a huge collection of taxidermied animals heads. However, the prop budget must have been low because every single one of those trophies looks like it was found rotting in the garbage. David Caruso probably still has fleas from having been near those goddamn things.
#7 – If you want to know how popular Star Wars was at the time, just watch this movie. Twenty-four minutes into it and you see a Star Wars beach blanket. No reason. It’s just there. Oh, and characters pork on it, which is appropriate.
#8 – You know, for a movie featuring two pretty girls in bikinis there isn’t any gratuitous nudity at all. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t demand nudity out of movies like this, but I also usually don’t like my smut this clean. Still, thank you ladies. I am just happy that you’re there. You’re both gorgeous.
#9 – The Alien Hunter uses a pretty cool looking biomechanical weapon. He throws a starfish looking thing that latches onto you with its teeth and fills you with poison and acid. The effect is dated, but certainly ambitious.
#10 – I don’t think Jack Palance himself knew if he was playing a good guy or a bad guy, even at the end of the film. He plays the character as so sinister that you honestly can’t tell what he might do. In a weird way, it kind of improves the movie.
WAS IT ACTUALLY BAD?
It’s sort of bad. I can’t recommend it for any other reason than to watch as a curiosity. It was fun for me because I am incredibly old and old movies like this feel like a warm nostalgic blanket. They’re a portal to another place and another time where I get to be twelve years old again, sitting in front of the monstrously large wood panelled TV in a wood panelled living room, eating stove top popcorn and drinking New Coke. The biggest worry I have is homework and my biggest disappointment is not getting the Optimus Prime toy for Christmas. However, for anyone born in the nineties or later, there isn’t much here. I suppose you might enjoy it for Palance and Landau’s acting and for it’s similarities to Predator. Beyond that though, meh. Honestly, this is the kind of movie Hollywood should remake. There is a great movie hidden deep in here, but it wasn’t the movie they made. That’s for damn sure.
WITHOUT WARNING stars Jack Palance as Joe Taylor, Martin Landau as Fred ‘Sarge’ Dobbs, Tarah Nutter as Sandy, Christopher S. Nelson as Greg, Lynn Theel as Beth, David Caruso as Tom, Cameron Mitchell as Hunter, Kevin Peter Hall as The Alien. It was written by Daniel Grodnik, Lyn Freeman, Bennett Tramer, and Steve Mathis, and was directed by Greydon Clark.
