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.
