Without Warning (1980)

I actually remember seeing this film when it was first shown on UK television.  Back in the eighties ITV used to show low budget horror movies like this in late night midweek slots and caught quite a few of them, but Without Warning (1980) stuck in my memory for some reason.  Perhaps it was the above average, for this sort of production, maybe it was the surprisingly decent special effects or perhaps it was the film's wildly uneven tone, but I never forgot it.  Ignoring my normal advice to myself to never go back and revisit memorable movie experiences for fear that they won't live up to the memories and leave me disappointed, I took the opportunity to re-watch Without Warning last weekend.  I could have re-watched it many times over the years - it is easily available on many free streaming services - but for some reason it was its appearance on Tubi's new UK service that prompted me to give it another look.  I guess that I was just in the right mood.  It actually didn't disappoint me - it turned out that it had made a sufficient impression upon the younger me that it turned out that my memories of the film's details were pretty accurate.  As mentioned before, the film musters a pretty heavyweight cast for a cheap direct-to-video movie, headlining Jack Palance and Martin Landau, with veteran B-movie character actors Neville Brand, Ralph Meeker and Cameron Mitchell in support.  Of these, it is Palance and Landau who dominate and pretty much carry the film.  Cameron Mitchell, sadly, only appears for a few minutes at the beginning of the film - perhaps he simply had a spare half day in his busy filming scheduled, so was able to sandwich a couple of hours shooting for Without Warning between half a dozen other B-movies he was doubtless filming simultaneously.  While his presence is always welcome, here his character is unfortunately killed off before he can get into his stride of scenery chewing.

This deficiency is more than compensated for, though, by Palance and Landau's antics, with the two seemingly in a contest to see who can give the most over-the-top performance.  It's pretty much a dead heat, while Landau's deranged Vietnam veteran is at least meant to be disturbed, Palance's gas station owner is just full on bonkers because, well, he's played by Jack Palance, who portrayed every character he played as a raving lunatic, whether it was written that way or not.  By contrast, the younger characters are all pretty much colourless and played by unknowns - with the exception of a young David Caruso in one of his first film appearances.  They are thinly drawn characters who exist purely to act as fodder for the villain of the piece to kill horribly at regular intervals.  Said villain is an alien hunter, who kills his prey using star-shaped parasites, which he throws at his victims - when they are hit, the creatures burrow tentacles into their flesh and kill them.  The scenes with these parasites flying through the air and attaching themselves to victims are pretty well done and suitably bloody.  Naturally, Palance is so tough that he survives several attacks, bloodily cutting the parasites off with a knife.  The alien itself is also pretty well realised for such a low budget film, only glimpsed for most of the film and even at the climax filmed from a distance, giving it a certain eerie presence.  These scenes also manage some tension and even a few shocks - there are some surprising entries in the victim list, for instance.  There's also an effectively creepy, isolated back woods, feel to the film, which lends the whole thing a genuine sense of uneasiness.  Good as these aspects of the film are, it has real trouble knowing what to do between the set-pieces, with the plot resolving into meaningless chases and talky exposition, sapping the movie's pace and momentum.  There are also some curious variations i n tone: while most of the film is clearly meant as a serious science fiction horror movie, the early sequence with  group of boy scouts seems, initially, to be played for laughs, with Larry Storch's hapless scoutmaster desperately attempting to light an illicit cigarette by striking two flint stones together in hope of generating a spark.  But it then abruptly turns back to horror as he gorily falls victim to the parasites.

Overall, though, prolific B-movie director Greydon Clark delivers a pretty effective science fiction horror movie that delivers the requisite quotas of gore, tension and scares, albeit somewhat unevenly.  It's strength lies in the fact that it clearly knows its own limitations, keeping the scope of the action tightly contained, both in terms of geography and timescale, with everything happening in the course of a few hours in a single remote locale.   It has the distinction of prefiguring the bigger budgeted Predator (1987) - it even features Kevin Peter Hall, who portrayed the title character in the later film, as the alien hunter.  Re-watching Without Warning turned out to be a surprisingly pleasurable experience for me - sure, there's nothing especially original or innovative about it, but is a decently made exploitation movie.  If nothing else, it's worth watching simply to see Jack Palance and Martin Landau chewing up the scenery as they deliver, even by their standards, truly lunatic performances.