Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Oh hell yes. I cannot tell you how long I’ve been searching for this movie ‘Without Warning’ having only a vague recollection of it from my childhood years from staying up late at night watching CBS Latenite TV. The only two things I could remember to assist me in my search were flying omelets with teeth and Larry Storch. I couldn’t even remember the title. Then just a couple of days ago while channel surfing and completely ‘Without Warning’ MGM HD was showing this movie. It only took one second, I saw an omelet totally wrecking some dudes face, and I knew I had found it. I set the DVR to find the next showing and viola! Flying omelets eating Academy Award winners. You can’t beat that with a stick.

It’s early in the morning and Angry Dude (the late Cameron Mitchell) is trying to do some hunting with his son Bitch Ass Sissy (Darby Hinton). Bitch Ass does a few things that really annoy his old man. For starters he likes to read. Pisses the old guy off something fierce. Secondly he likes to sleep. Thirdly he has no desire to kill Bambi. This clown could be no son of mine. But not because of that other stuff but because he wears jeans so tight that you can see the crease of his ass and he wears open chested flowery shirts that billow in the wind. Even in 1980 this was gay. Flying omelets get both of those dudes.

Next say hello to Greg (Christopher S. Nelson) and his boy Tom as played by a cherubic David Caruso wearing a pair of the tiniest, tightest nut hugging Larry Bird’s you will ever want to see. This day Tom is hooking up with his girl Beth (Lynne Theel) and her best friend Sandy (Tarah Nutter). Apparently Sandy has a bit of rep as Tom tells Greg that this blind date is ‘money in the bank’. Hell yes. They are going to the lake but Crazy Dude #1 Joe (Jack Palance) tells them not to go. I mean he’s pretty damn passionate about this. Do they listen? Of course they don’t. One minute Greg and Sandy see Tom and Beth making out on the beach, the next time they see them they are on meat hooks.

Obviously this freaks them out. What’s worse than being a teenager in the woods with bad cell phone service? Cell phones not being invented yet. With vicious omelets hot on their asses, Greg and Sandy make it to town to the local pub. You would think Greg busting in the joint all hysterical and stuff, letting the patrons know that his friends, among others including Larry Storch, are all dead on meat hooks would spur these people into action but they need ‘more information’ before they call the cops. This is about the time Crazy Dude #2 Sarge (Martin Landau) takes over the scene. Sarge knows the alien and his flying omelets are out there but Sarge is a certified lunatic and as such nobody believes him. Then Sarge shoots the sheriff. Now we know why they needed ‘more information’ because this sheriff would require a damn good reason to leave the police house because there’s a good chance Sarge is going to shoot somebody and it’s safer to just stay away. Sarge also thinks the kids are possessed aliens and forced him to shoot the sheriff. Sarge is a lunatic.

But as crazy as Sarge might be, Joe may be even crazier. He seems lucid but Joe is ready to hunt and he needs the kids to help him to do this and for some stupid reason they agree to this. Well, they agree to this because Joe told them they had no choice. This goes about as well as you might expect and our kids are on the run from killer omelets yet again. And Sarge. You would think Sarge, who just shot a cop, would be detained somewhere… oh no, not in this town. He just gets a firm tongue lashing. In fact if you shoot a cop in this town they let you cruise around in his cop car since he won’t be needing it. Ancient Academy Award winners versus the Predator’s granddad… who will win?

How magical is ‘Without Warning’? Not very, all things considered, but we’re not considering all things here, just the recollections of a youth reliving his childhood, and in that sense this movie is completely magical. True enough, Landau and Palance didn’t have their award hardware yet, considering this was around the time when both legends would’ve done just about anything that involved a legitimate payday, but this doesn’t mean they were half-stepping in this film. No sir, they took this movie deadly serious, and it shows. That’s called ‘respect for your craft’. And while we make fun of the omelets, those things were really well designed. The edges glow as they sail through the air, they have teeth, they drool, they have tendrils, they bubble up when cut and they are completely disgusting. They don’t move very fast so you would think one could easily sidestep them but nobody ever tried to do that.

Now true enough ‘Without Warning’ doesn’t move as fast as one would probably like from an action alien murder thriller, especially when it gets started, and unlike Landau and Palance there will probably be no golden acting hardware coming to our beleaguered kids anytime soon. We do have a soft spot for actress Lynne Theel considering the last time we saw her in a movie she was getting raped by a mutated salmon in ‘Humanoids from the Deep’. Absolutely brilliant in that movie.

‘Without Warning’ might not make complete sense 100% of the time but it is a movie about an alien throwing vicious omelets at people like frisbees so we can excuse this. A classic that for some reason cannot be attained by any means. No VHS (that I’m aware of), no DVD and certainly no Blu-Ray. That is an outrage! Fix this MGM.