Sunday 8 May 2016

Without Warning 1980





Stars: Jack Palance, Kevin Hall
Directed: Greydon Clark
Budget: $150,000

Right this film is one of the very few films I can honestly hold my hands up and say genuinely shit me up when i was a kid. So I'm about 11 I get cable in my room for the first time and am watching I think bravo about 1am.
This film comes on my then naïve mind doesn't fully comprehend the full plot I think these disc creatures are the main enemy of the film, despite now rewatching it and seeing they were scared of something else other than them lol.

So we join the film with a father and son hunting in the mountains, a rather older son and father situation mind like 50&30 years respectively. The father is killed in front of his son by some spinning disc like creatures, when they hit you with gnashing teeth they lock on and burrow tentacles into your skin. Why these people don't just try and pull them off I'll never know, but yes these things made me crap my pants as a kid.
Just the fear of scary little creatures like this flying at you. So like all late seventies to early nineties horror clichés we get a group of 'young' teens going to do a spot of 'camping'

They pull over for gas at a seemingly deserted gas station, the two men fill the van as the two girls look for the toilets. One of the girls meets sarge here, a mentally ill war vet.
They enter the shop to pay where they are further alienated and warned by jacks character, Joe Taylor not to go hiking. Like all good teens they ignore his warnings.
Before the teens get picked off we see a scout master killed before his cubs and they go running off. So when two of the teens don't come back later on the other two go looking for them, only to find a small shack/shed with corpses in.
They escape with one of the creatures gnashing away at their vans window. They try to get help from the bar but the townsfolk don't believe them, only sarge does.

Sandy the teen girl encounters the alien (played by KPH) responsible for the discs and runs off, she is rescued by Joe who brings her back. In the bar they try to formulate a plan but sarge accidentally kills the sheriff when he shows up only making him a more untrustworthy mess. Gregg the boy and Sandy leave with Taylor who reveals he's actually been attacked by the discs and survived. Showing them one pickled in a jar, they search for the shack but Taylor is quickly attacked by another disc.
The two youths run off leaving him for dead, at his request mind and stumble upon a police car. Thinking they are saved they quickly realise the driver is a maddened sarge. He believes the two are aliens, Gregg tells him they are and a massive invasion force is on the way giving the two a gap to escape the lunatic.

Wet after leaping into a river Gregg and Sandy find an abandoned house with a change of clothes. Sandy falls asleep only to awake not long later and goes to look for Gregg, she turns his chair around only see a disc thing sucking away at his face. She flees screaming only to be saved by Taylor again who explains how he sees comparisons with the alien and hunters, he's using humans as prey. They set up trap at the shack which is almost spoiled by sarge showing up.

So thats almost that, as you know I don't spoil endings despite this being pretty generic there's some good acting and quite a few cameos of pretty popular actors of the time. I still enjoyed this and get a few memory chills from it lol so I give this film a good 4 out of 5 stars


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