fstammen I re-watched this movie recently because it made a great impression on me back in the days. It predates Predator but is very similar in story: an alien hunter comes to earth to bag him some humans. The movie starts off with the alien going to work quickly bagging him two hunters and a boy scout leader. The boy scouts also see the alien and run away screaming. Here the low budget and B status show, the kids clearly are not screaming but they dubbed the screams and errrr, overdoing it somewhat. Also 4 young adults want to go swim in a lake in the mountains. On their way they need to gas up the van and they meet Sarge, a veteran who does not need character development: he is clearly psyched. In the toilet the youths see a line written on the wall, check the movie because it will be revealed later on what it means. Also the gas station owner is a hunter and the youths are looking at the dead animals hanging on the walls. This is also a link to what the alien is doing because it does not take long for 2 of the kids being bagged and the other 2 go look for them, finding a shed in the woods. Then the alien tries to bag them too but they manage to escape in the van after the obligatory "it does not start" scenes. They flee to a bar were Sarge and some other people hang out and they inform the police. Here some more standard B movie stuff happens, like the electricity falling out at the same time the sheriff walks in while the Sarge is wielding a gun to go hunt for the alien. Also the standard stuff happens when the 2 youths find a vacation house to hide in and the alien comes to visit there too. The final scene also shows the B part, the acting is a little cheesy and the situation is not too believable since the alien seems to be like a scarecrow just standing around. But there is a lot of suspense in this movie and the concept of an alien hunting people using the flying meat discs from Star Trek is also cool. So go watch this movie as it's one of the better B SF horror movies from around that time.

Mr_Ectoplasma Rubber headed aliens, flying disks of death, and a bunch of kids camping in the woods — what else could you ask for from a drive-in sci-fi flick? "Without Warning" is one of the goofier alien horror films to slip through the cracks of mass celluloid, but it's an earnest effort that deserves a look from genre fans. The film is remarkably low budget, though the sophistication with which many of the alien sequences is pulled off is impressive. Several sequences in the film come to mind, specifically with the group of boy scouts, but the shock value of these sequences is surprising when considering the production values and the film's cultural context in relation to the science fiction and alien predators of today.Speaking of, the film does premeditate the Schwarzenegger classic, though tonally as well as in a multitude of other ways, they are very different films. One of the greatest things "Without Warning" benefits from is the moody photography of its desolate locations. The emptiness and sinister solitude of the California desert is extremely well captured, and supplements the film in that it supplies a sense of dread and discomfort that is still prevalent amongst the hokeyness of the alien getups. Another point of interest is the number of Hollywood leading men who make appearances in the film as old men, including Ralph Meeker, Martin Landau, Jack Palance, and Cameron Mitchell.Overall, "Without Warning" is strictly a film for a very specific audience. If you can't deal with aliens who look like this year's trick-or-treaters, then you're likely going to write off the entire thing as absolutely silly, and I suppose it is. That said, if you can suspend disbelief and roll with the eighties vibe, there are some genuinely creepy elements to the film and surprisingly slick special effects given the shoestring budget. 7/10.

Lee Eisenberg The cornball sci-fi flick "Without Warning" is widely seen as a semi-inspiration for the more famous "Predator", which also stars Kevin Peter Hall as an alien that goes around killing humans. What I notice is that the stars of this movie, Jack Palance and Martin Landau, both eventually went on to win Best Supporting Actor, much like how "Predator" stars Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura later became governors.Anyway, the movie is about what you'd expect. The copy that I watched even had Greek subtitles (it was probably either a copy of a copy or taped off the TV). It turns out that makeup artist Greg Cannom also did the makeup for "Mrs. Doubtfire" and "Titanic", while director Greydon Clark pretty much directed B movies throughout his whole career. This movie makes no pretense about what kind of movie it is. It's pretty enjoyable.

Michael_Elliott Without Warning (1980)* 1/2 (out of 4) An all-star cast (with two future Oscar-winners) highlight this rather silly, low-budget science fiction movie about an alien stalking a small town where several people fall victim to its boomerang like flying smaller alien. Yes, this here is the film that features small alien creatures flying through the air, attaching themselves to people and basically chewing them up. If the IMDb trivia page is true then the budget of this thing was just $150,000 and half of that went to stars Jack Palance and Martin Landau. I don't know if that's really the budget but I was surprised to see how good the special effects actually were. The scenes of these creatures attaching themselves to people and eating them were quite good as were a few scenes where we see what's left of the bodies. With that said, just about everything else is pretty bad including the direction, which just doesn't bring any energy to what we're watching. There's never a sense of danger. There's never any drama and there's really not any characters to care about. The subplot of the four teenagers (including a young David Caruso) just doesn't add up to much. What makes the film barely worth watching are the veteran actors led by Palance and Landau. Palance pretty much plays the tough guy and Landau is the weird nut who always knew aliens would come. One of the highlights of the film was seeing the two of them and Neville Brand working together in a sequence. We even get to see Cameron Mitchell in a small scene and Ralph Meeker is here as well. As for the rest of the film, there's really not much that works here and add in the wrong long running time and WITHOUT WARNING is pretty forgettable.