Without Warning (1980)

aka It Came Without Warning

There's trouble afoot in the rural area surrounding a lake somewhere in the USA. An alien (Kevin Peter Hall) uses the place as its hunting ground, killing people by throwing little living discs with the cutest teeth at them, and storing the corpses in a practical little shack. The fiend even gets Cameron Mitchell before the plot is getting going!

The situation escalates when a quartet of four teenagers arrives (oh look, it's a pre-sunglasses David Caruso in one of the meat roles, and he's wearing shorts in a most disturbing manner), and two of them manage to escape the alien into the loving arms of the local bar population. Because it's that sort of film, the closest the kids get to any actual help are great white hunter Joe Taylor (Jack Palance) and Vietnam vet and conspiracy theorist Fred "Sarge" Dobbs (Martin Landau). It's just too bad that Taylor is a bit too much into going mano-a-mano with his hunting brother from outer space and Sarge is so crazy he becomes convinced everyone around him - including the kids - is an alien invader in disguise.

Without Warning is a typical film by minor yet always interesting cult movie auteur Greydon Clark. I always have the impression Clark was at his best when he had the opportunity to direct comedies. At the very least, he seldom seemed very interested in the more straightforward elements of his films in other genres, and preferred to turn up the off-beat humour and the sideways weirdness in those of his movies that weren't actually supposed to be comedies.

The film at hand is no exception there, what with its numerous strange comical bits and detours into strange characters like Cameron Mitchell and his son who just can't seem to get onto the same page; I side with the son's scepticism towards using the phrase "hubba hubba" unironically - or at all - and hating books, I gotta say. That sort of thing distracts from what is supposedly the film's main thrust - you know, that thing about the alien hunter predating Predator? And yes, imaginary reader, I agree, there should be no copyright on ideas, and it's neither of the two movies who had the alien hunter idea initially anyhow.

However, most of the film's detours are so entertaining - or just plain befuddling enough - that I think it's quite impossible not to be entertained by Without Warning. After all, there are not only the strange characters (except for the teens, which are as lacking in character traits as the genre mandates, though I did like Tarah Nutter's somewhat awkward performance enough to root for her over the guy in the big headed alien suit, which surely counts for something) to fall in love with, there's also a scenery chewing competition between Jack Palance and Martin Landau. I think Landau wins that competition easily, but then a crazy Vietnam veteran conspiracy theorist is a more fruitful base for thespian overindulgence than an Ahab without a whale.

Despite Clark trying his best to distract the audience from the very basic man in a monster suit tale he and his four writers are telling, I even discovered some worthwhile moments in the more horror movie-like parts of Without Warning. Some of the sequences of the alien stalking its prey and of said prey running around in fear of it work quite well, mostly thanks to Dean Cundey's typically great photography that turns what could be rote and uninterested moody and tense.

The script also has its moments. A lot of it is just horribly silly stuff to give people a reason to run through the woods, but from time to time, like with the death of the next to last teenager, or the scene when Nutter's character suddenly comes down from an adrenaline high and remembers her dead best friend, there's a streak of self-assured grimness and a willingness to give non-characters moments of humanity on display that stands in hard contrast to the adorable mugging of Landau and Palance, and the off-beat humour.

While the alien suit is somewhat bland - and of course very unconvincing - the design and execution of the gooey little disc things we see much more often is quite great, clearly keeping with the tradition of all those lovely latex things out to suck your blood with tiny tentacle thingies and really dig in(to your heart) with the cutest little teeth. In other words, they're just as adorable as they are creepy.

It's … than one would expect might be Without Warning's catchphrase too, for it is also funnier, sillier, and grimmer than one would expect. Now, I'm not arguing this is one of the great ignored films of the cult cinema canon (a thing I'm not sure I even believe in, nor would want to exist), I'm just saying it's much more ambitious and interesting than it needed to be as a film about a guy in a monster suit chasing people through the woods.

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Uninvited (1988)

Some things can only happen in Florida. A poisonous killer kitty escapes from the lab that created it, killing a handful of people with its powerful cat fu on the way out.

Through a peculiar set of unbelievable circumstances Killer Cat will land on the yacht of the especially evil Wall Street shark Walter Graham (Alex Cord). Right now, Graham is trying to keep up his appearance of being a suave slime bag, but is living in desperate fear of the SEC. He's desperate enough to let his henchalcoholic Albert (Clu Gulager) drown a potential whistleblower in the yacht's Jacuzzi, while Walter and his partner Mike (George "I was in Towering Inferno, so what's this dignity you speak of!?" Kennedy) watch gleefully.

They could have spared themselves the murder rap and the audience two scenes of little import, because the next day news come in that tell Wally and Mickey they'd better grab their traditional silver suitcases full of money and make off to that equally traditional safe haven of scumbags with money, the Cayman Islands. How impractical that Walter has scared off his boat's crew and only the captain, Rachel (Toni Hudson) is left! The film explains her staying with a long and tragic story about the yacht once belonging to her father and her wanting to buy it back to start a charter business. Captain Rachel is also too morally upright to sleep with Walter, which is a definite plus.

The crewless bastards are in luck. Two bimbettes (Clare Carey and Shari Shattuck) Walter has invited to a party that will never happen arrive with three male bimbos who look quite ideal to become the new crew in tow. The blonder bimbette has also brought an adorable little cat she found in a garbage can in port…

Of course, kitty will start killing again soon, the boat's motor will strike, the cat will poison the food supply and everyone will go batty, except for Captain Rachel and Martin (Eric Larson), who turns out not to be a bimbo at all, but a student of biology. Instant smittenness ensues. Of course.

Whoever might survive the adventure on the high seas?

Thanks to his much earlier work on films like Wacko and Satan's Cheerleaders, I possess a certain amount of respect for Uninvited's director and writer Greydon Clark. The man has talent and a skewed sense of humour I appreciate. Unfortunately, this film about an adorable killer kitten seems to be meant to be taken seriously, how improbable that may sound.

Clark might be surprised (or not) to hear that a single, normal looking cat is not all that believable as a threat for a boat full of people, even people as dumb as the intolerably stupid characters this film is filled with. Strangely enough, the script doesn't even use the opportunity to make one of the characters an ailurophobe. Walter certainly doesn't like cats, but that is only another instance of the bastard being a man of dubious character (who will, after the rules of bad horror movies, have to pay for his bastardness in the end, don't worry).

What seems to have been on Clark's mind isn't making something as unthreatening as a cat look dangerous and sinister on film anyway. In fact, his thoughts seem to have moved in quite a different direction: how to make his unimpressive killer beast even less impressive. And man, he realized the dream with the help of true special effects magic. Turns out that the one thing that looks less dangerous than a cat is a large (hand?-) puppet standing in for a cat, and what looks even less dangerous than that is when that first cat puppet vomits up another, slightly blackish and mangy looking cat puppet, which then does most of the killing (and changes rapidly in shape and size throughout the film). It's like a matryoshka doll of high monster hilarity.

Obviously, Uninvited is at its best whenever the kitten of doom is on screen, either in its adorable animal form or in one of the excellent kitten muppet attack sequences.

Alas, a bad movie does not live from monster attacks alone (although they all should). The rest of the film doesn't always reach the heights of these core moments or the sheer attractiveness of its feline star, yet you can't say it doesn't do its best with the help of some excitingly bad work in front and behind the camera.

First and foremost (and therefore dead way too soon) there are Gulager hamming it up (or just being really drunk, I'm not sure about that) like a cowboy John Carradine and George Kennedy kicking butt in an ineptly choreographed action sequence while wearing the same pained facial expression he always wears.

At first it seems as if the rest of the cast is just no fun at all. But they're just keeping their full non-powers in check for the first parts of the film. In the last half hour or so, everybody goes into screeching hysteria mode (excellent whining there, Miss Shattuck!), which always has its charms and additionally keeps one's ear drums well trained.

For the connoisseur of the ugly, there's some 80s bikini fashion so eye-gouging even I noticed it and a short aerobic sequence. The latter scene is of course filmed with a leering eye. The film as a whole does - to my great disappointment - not venture deep into the realm of the truly sleazy. There may be one-and-a-half sex scene(s), but Greydon does all in his (in this case considerable) power to let them look as unexciting as possible. At least the half one ends in a stealth hand-nibble scene right out of "Metal Gear Feline" or "Kitten - The Dark Project".

Further highpoints are a great sinking ship model - as known from my bathtub - and an inane "man and woman versus cat puppet on a life boat" fight that just repeats itself for a second time, and which words fail me to describe correctly.

There is much to love about Uninvited.

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