I saw the very low budget sci-fi/horror film Without Warning one night while it was playing on cable way, waaaay back in the very early 1980’s.  Perhaps as early as 1981.

I remembered very little about it, but what I did recall stuck with me for decades.

Here’s the theatrical trailer.  Sorry for its relatively low quality (I couldn’t find anything significantly better), but in seeing this trailer, some of the stuff I remembered so clearly can be found within:

To elaborate, my main memories of the film involved the flying “organic” discs that the alien flings at its victims.  I remembered finding the whole thing so gory…again, for that particular time.

It would appear others remembered those details too because Shout! Factory has been kind enough to release Without Warning in a special edition BluRay with considerable bells and whistles.  After seeing the movie listing on Amazon a few times, I finally gave in and ordered it.  (A quick aside: I also purchased the original 1979 Tourist Trap and have pre-ordered the 1973 The Long Goodbye and 1972 Hickey and Boggs…viva the movies of the 1970’s!)

When the movie arrived, I simply had to see it from start to end and see what/why pieces of it had lingered in my mind for so very long.

What I found was a decent enough horror film that can rightly be called a precursor to the far better known Predator.  Certainly the plots of both films share this much in common: They both feature a mysterious and deadly alien hunter whose prey is homo-sapiens…and who has no trouble killing his prey in gruesome ways.

While Predator featured a bigger budget and, while scary, was primarily an action film, Without Warning’s focus is more toward horror.

Like Predator, the plot is quite simple: Two young men and two young women (included among them a very, very young David Caruso) head out the “lake” but before reaching it stumble upon some seriously strange locals at a run down gas station (Jack Palance and Martin Landau, both of hamming it up and turning their creepiness factor to “11”).  Martin Landau appears dazed, a veteran of the armed forces who may not have a grip on reality.  Jack Palance, on the other hand, is razor focused and imposing.  When the young ‘uns tell him they’re going to the lake, he warns them to stay away…for, he says there are hunters there.

What follows is a pretty decent (if not all that terrifically acted by the newcomers), Lovecraftian story involving the survivors of the trip to the lake and Palance and Landau’s characters as they face off against the alien threat.

The film was quite good in the early going, when we see people become victims to the aliens and, eventually, when the main characters gather together in the diner sequence.  If you’re a movie buff, you’ll find a couple of fascinating faces in that particular crowd, including the last acting appearance of the very best Mike Hammer there ever was, Ralph Meeker.

Shortly after this diner sequence, the film kinda slows down as we follow the young survivors of the lake and, unfortunately, during this period of time both Martin Landau and Jack Palance disappear.

But, fret not as they return in time for the climax which…well, is explosive, but all too obviously on a much smaller scale than the film’s makers would want us to believe.

Despite its flaws, I enjoyed seeing this for the most part forgotten film.  Is it classic cinema?  No.  Is it unjustly forgotten?  Probably not, though seeing all these veteran actors chewing the scenery is fun.  As for the gore that stuck with me all these years, I suspect by today’s standards all these scenes could be shown on TV completely uncut.

If you’re like me and have any memory at all about Without Warning, its a fun trip into the past.  For those who are thrilled with the idea of Jack Palance and Martin Landau facing off in a Lovecraftian horror film, you might want to give it a spin.  For everyone else, it might be a pass.

You know where I stand!