Oxymoronically also known as The Warning, this is a likeable bit of no-budget backwoods science fiction from Greydon Clark, one that boasts a fine cast of tough talking veterans, some good photography from Dean Cundy and an impressive, if barely seen, alien. It can also claim, up to a point at least, to anticipate the much better known and superficially similar Predator (1987), both films featuring a tall alien (played in both instances by Kevin Peter Hall) hunting human prey.
A reactionary hunter (Cameron Mitchell) tries to teach his more liberal-minded son (Darby Hinton) the dubious joys of the outdoor life on a hunting trip. They are attacked my small, disc-like creature that fly into them, attaching themselves to their bodies with their tentacles. Elsewhere, a troop of cub scouts is on a ramble when their leader (Larry Storch) is similarly attacked and killed. A group of teenagers (Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson, David Caruso and Lynn Theel) arrive and ignore the warnings of truck stop owner Joe Taylor (Jack Palance), travelling to a remote lake for a camping break. Two of them are soon missing in action while the others find themselves menaced not only by the flying discs and the barely seen alien hunter that deploys them, but also the traumatised Vietnam vet and alien invasion conspiracist Fred ‘Sarge’ Dobbs (Martin Landau) who becomes increasingly unhinged as the bodies start to pile up.
The alien – which we don’t actually see properly until the last seven minutes or so – boasts an impressive choice of hunting weapon, a furry, highly aggressive little critter that it casually throws like a Frisbee and which latches on to its victim, burrowing beneath their skin. They’re a bit wobbly when seen it flight but are suitably nasty when they hit their target, hideous teeth gnashing at a car windscreen in one failed attack and later found feasting on bodies in the alien’s makeshift trophy room. The killer Frisbees and the main alien are nicely designed and executed by effects artists Greg Cannom and the grandly named Phillip Joseph Quinlivan III though it’s one of the few low budget films where we’d like to see a bit more of the aliens. Clark has a tendency to shy away from showing the details of too many of the actual attacks and one suspects that his budget simply couldn’t run to many more.
The main draw here is the great cast. Cameron Mitchell – a gun totin’ redneck resentful of his book-reading, feather-haired adult son – gets taken out agreeably early leaving the stage clear for the altogether better Martin Landau whose UFO nut could be a younger, wilder-eyed version of the conspiracy theorist Landau played in the first X Files film in 1998. Jack Palance is as grizzled as ever as the local truck stop owner who comes to the kids’ rescue (he gets a fine moment rushing into unarmed combat with the extra-terrestrial invader screeching “alien!” at the top of his lungs) and Neville Brand and Ralph Meeker turn up briefly as a sceptical barflys. Clark commendably gives these old time hams their head and they make the most of the opportunity, giving entertainingly full throttle performances, particularly Palance who is great fun as the steely-eyed, alien-ass-kicking Taylor.
They go a long way to making up for the flavourless quartet of teens (though one of them is David Caruso, later a regular in NYPD Blue (1993-2005) and CSI: Miami (2002-2012)) who turn up in the woods in a van, instantly recalling the equally doomed young tourists of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The Warning was released in the wake of Halloween (1978) – also shot by Cundey – and began shooting not long after Sean S. Cunningham took his foolhardy teens into the woods for Friday the 13th (1980) and Clark got in just before the market became flooded with horny, brainless jocks and bimbos being slaughtered in the great outdoors left, right and centre.
It’s all very silly with some oddly placed comic relief from a scoutmaster (Larry Storch) whose troop come to the attention of the predatory alien feeling bolted on to the rest of the decidedly po-faced action. But there’s something endearingly absurd about the whole enterprise that keeps you hanging in there until the alien finally shows itself in the climax. The script is all over the place, characters repeatedly make seriously bad decisions and the film is rarely as scary as Clark would have liked but there’s something likeable about it nonetheless. It even manages to somehow forget all about the alien for great stretches, Landau’s whacked out Vietnam vet being the principal villain for much of the film.
At heart Without Warning is a bare-bones slasher, devoid of even the most rudimentary stylistic flourish, though Cundy works hard to make the alien look suitably menacing as it wanders about the fog-shrouded woods and he seems to have held on to the Panaglide that he used in Halloween for the killer’s POV shots which he recreates here. Clark, a former actor in the films of Al Adamson, made few genre films (Satan’s Cheerleaders (1977), The Return (1981), Wacko (1982), Uninvited (1988) et al – he also wrote and produced Psychic Killer (1975)) and Without Warning is one of the most fun. Watch it expecting to see a lot more of the alien and you’ll be disappointed. Watch if for a fine cast of grizzled old timers doing what they do best and for Martin Landau losing the plot completely and it’ll pass an hour and half harmlessly enough.
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