Directed by Greydon Clark
Written by Lyn Freeman, Daniel Grodnik, Ben Nett, Steve Mathias
Starring Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Tarah Nutter, Christopher S. Nelson
Rating: R
Runtime: 89 minutes
Available to purchase from Kino Lorber on blu-ray, here

by Clayton Hayes, Staff Writer

Without Warning is (perhaps mercifully) my first encounter with the works of Greydon Clark, though I’ll admit that his 1977 film Satan’s Cheerleaders has been on my Letterboxd watchlist for quite a while (I’m a sucker for ‘70s occult horror). Clark is a fairly infamous cult/exploitation filmmaker whose work was featured multiple times on the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and would continue to appear on the follow-up project RiffTrax. And, after sitting through this, it’s not hard to understand why.

A somewhat odd genre mashup for the time, Without Warning seems to have been trying to cash in on multiple recent successes at once. I’d guess it was sold as Alien meets Halloween, though it doesn’t come close to either. After an early sequence introduces us to the killer’s M.O. (throwing hairy, bloodsucking frisbees at people), we meet a group of teenagers preparing for an afternoon by the lake. Beth (Lynn Theel) and Tom (David Caruso, apparently in his feature film debut) are trying to set up their friends Sandy (Tarah Nutter) and Greg (Christopher S. Nelson). At a gas station along the way they run into PTSD-ridden vet Fred ‘Sarge’ Dobbs (Martin Landau) and trophy-collecting hunter Joy Taylor (Jack Palance).

Palance, predictably, warns the kids not to go to the lake. Just as predictably, they ignore the warning and are quickly impaled by the alien flesh discs. Sandy and Greg barely escape with their lives, but not before discovering a store of recent victims in an old, abandoned shack. The plot, not the most coherent as it was, really starts to unravel from that point on. The kids flee to a bar where Sarge overhears their story and gets pretty worked up about an alien invasion. Taylor shows up as well, spouts some misogynistic nonsense, and then Sarge accidentally shoots the town sheriff. At some point Sarge becomes convinced the alien can take on human form and spends the rest of the film causing trouble for just about everybody. Sandy and Greg do quite a lot of running around in the dark, while Taylor manages to rig the abandoned shack with dynamite. Mostly it’s just a blur except for a scene where Palance runs across an open field yelling “ALIEN!” at the top of his lungs.

What else is there to say about Without Warning? I think if you’re watching, you knew what you were getting into. It’s a genuinely bad movie and, though it never quite reached the heights of absurdity I was hoping for, if you’re looking to watch some silly sci-fi horror this definitely fits the bill. And, if I’m honest, it does have a compelling enough idea behind it that you might get hooked. There was definitely an attempt at mirroring Taylor’s trophy hunting with the alien’s, and it wasn’t too many years later that the straw of Without Warning’s alien-hunts-humans-for-sport premise would be spun into gold with John McTiernan’s Predator. After all, Kevin Peter Hall played both the titular Predator in that film and the frisbee-throwing menace in this one.

It’s kind of surprising that Without Warning isn’t even a bit more effective, though, given its crew. Dean Cundey is the main name that pops out, and his recruitment for this film (having served as DP on Carpenter’s Halloween) until you realize this was his fifth collaboration with Greydon Clark. Cundey would go on to shoot the lion’s share of Carpenter’s best films, not to mention some of the biggest blockbusters of the ‘80s and ‘90s, but it’s hard to see much of that later brilliance here.

Though the alien itself doesn’t spend much time on screen, the makeup effects fare the best out of everything in the film (the interior of the alien’s makeshift larder is impressively gruesome). It was Greg Cannom, after all, who would go on to win four Oscars from 1992 to 2019. In fact, it may be that Without Warning is most interesting as an early credited film of his. Though writer/producer Daniel Grodnik claims that it was actually Rick Baker who created the alien’s head, Cannom was an uncredited assistant to Baker on several late ‘70s genre films so it’s certainly possible.

This particular release is not bad as far as extra features go. It has a cardboard sleeve and reversible jacket featuring newly-commissioned artwork by Vince Evans that retains the look of the original’s title while actually featuring some of the actors. It also has interviews with most of the folks I’ve mentioned so far, including Cundey, Cannom, Grodnik, Nutter, and Nelson. It also has a commentary track with Clark so, if you’re a fan of digging into the sordid past of silly flicks like Without Warning, there’s a lot to uncover here.