I bet you’ve not heard about Without Warning, the movie that directly inspired Predator…
There was a time in my mid-teens that I watched Predator every single day. It was a solid 6 months to a year that I’d stick it on before bed to settle in for the night.
And yes, I’m not diagnosed, but we’re all pretty sure.
There’s something about the way it’s put together that just doesn’t get old. The ridiculous, over the top action heroes with arms and chins bigger than any normal human could hope to have, a story that rollocks by at a galloping pace, and a big baddie that still holds up as one of the coolest aliens committed to film. It’s one of those films that feels very simple on paper, but it does what it does better than anything else. Plus the most gif-able high five in human history.
The point being, I bloody love it.
So when I was doomscrolling one evening and saw this clip from a movie that purported to be the inspiration for Predator, I definitely took notice. And then when I found that this film, Without Warning from 1980, is on YouTube in its entirety, you better believe I had my evening plans sorted.
And I just wanted to talk a little about it, because while not a good movie, it’s a good time and I think more people should know about it.
So within about 10 minutes, I got what these videos were going on about. It’s absolutely just B-movie Predator. An alien comes to Earth, heads out into a wooded area, and starts hunting people for sport. Not just killing them, but treating it like a game. Stalking, watching, taking trophies. The only thing missing was Danny Glover saying ‘Pussy face’. (I know that’s the sequel, but it’s still iconic, leave me alone).
And the similarities get even spookier when you realise the big bad alien in Without Warning is played by Kevin Peter Hall. The same Kevin Peter Hall who plays the Predator later on. Same height, same physical presence, same kind of performance inside a suit. Like don’t get me wrong, there probably weren’t many 7ft 2 actors around in the 1980s to call upon to play evil aliens, so maybe it’s not that weird. But still.
Without Warning was put together by Greydon Clark for a mere $150,000, which even for the time was chump change, and it only gets worse when you realise where that money went. A significant portion reportedly went to stars Jack Palance and Martin Landau, with some estimates suggesting their fees swallowed up half the entire budget.
The alien head alone, designed by the iconic Rick Baker, reportedly cost somewhere in the region of $19,000. Granted, it’s a cool head, but my lord it meant everything else was made on a shoestring.
And you can feel that when you’re watching it. Very little seems to have been built specifically for the film, and most of it looks like it was shot on real locations, woods, roads, a bar that was already there. But honestly that isn’t really a bad thing, and it gives the world this lived in feeling that makes it feel more immersive than the budget may suggest.
The opening scene is a good example of what the film does well and what it does badly at the same time. A father and son go out hunting, but ‘uh oh’, they’re the ones being hunted!
But instead of seeing the alien straight away, you get introduced to its weapons, which are these flying, disc-shaped buggers covered in hair with teeth and tentacles. They get thrown at people, latch on, and start aggressively nuzzling. On paper that sounds ridiculous, and honestly, it looks ridiculous as well. There’s no getting around that. But at the same time, the way they’re done, the practical effects, the movement, there’s something about them that I really like. Like, they’re nothing that’d much up to Yautja tech, but they still look nasty.
The effects work by Greg Cannom gives them this sticky, unpleasant quality that feels more visceral than the clean lasers and blades in Predator. One review I read described them as ‘super-leeches’, and I think that sums it up pretty well.
After that, the film settles into a structure that feels very familiar if you’ve watched any horror film from that era. A group of teenagers head into the woods, ignoring warnings from resident local nut played by Jack Palance. A tale as old as time.
Then Martin Landau shows up, and the film shifts in a way that I wasn’t expecting at all. He plays a character called Sarge, a Vietnam veteran who is completely convinced that the alien is just the beginning of something much larger. He thinks it’s an advance scout for an invasion, and that people around him are being replaced. And the thing is, Landau doesn’t play this as a joke. He plays it really straight and deadpan, which worked really well against the film’s more cheesy moments.
There’s a scene where he kidnaps two of the teenagers because he’s convinced they’re not human, and it turns into this strange back and forth where they try to convince him to let them go by playing along with his delusion. It sounds silly, and parts of it are, but there’s also something a bit uncomfortable about it because you can see that the character is not well. It feels like the film is brushing up against something more real and not quite knowing what to do with it. Considering when it was released, it’s hard not to read that as at least loosely connected to the aftermath of Vietnam, even if that wasn’t fully intentional.
Jack Palance, on the other hand, is delightfully mad. He plays this local hunter who has already encountered the alien and decided that the best course of action is to collect its weapons and wait for it to come back. There’s a moment where he runs straight at the alien shouting “alien” at full volume, and it’s one of those scenes that shouldn’t work but somehow does because of how committed he is to it.
The alien itself is kept mostly in the background, which seems to be a mix of creative choice and practical limitation. They couldn’t afford to show it too much, so they didn’t. But similar to the likes of Bruce in Jaws, the Xenomorph and the Predator itself, when it does appear properly, it has a presence. And again, that mostly comes down to Kevin Peter Hall. The design helps, but it’s the way he moves, the way he carries himself, that sells it. You can really see the early version of what would later become the Predator in that performance.
But the film did lose me a bit in the middle. There’s a stretch where the characters end up in a bar, trying to explain what’s going on, and the energy just drops. You can really feel them eking out the budget to fit a feature length runtime, and there’s not a whole lot to distract you from quite how cheap everything feels. Western legend Neville Brand is in those scenes as one of the locals, and he reacts to the whole situation by basically not caring at all, which is quite funny in its own way, but it doesn’t help the pacing.
This is where comparing it to John McTiernan’s Predator makes the biggest difference. Predator keeps pushing forward. Even in its quieter moments, it feels like it’s building towards something, and the testosterone-fuelled personalities keep it from ever feeling boring. Without Warning just sort of stalls for a while, and it takes time to get going again.
One thing that surprised me, though, was how good parts of it look. The cinematography by Dean Cundey, who worked with John Carpenter on Halloween and The Thing, gives the film a level of atmosphere that you wouldn’t expect from something made this cheaply. There’s shots in the woods that actually feel quite tense, especially when the alien is being kept out of sight. It doesn’t always hold together, but when it works, it really works.
By the time it finishes, I found myself liking it more than I expected to, and that was without 4 to 5 beers (which would’ve helped these easily get a 4 out of 5). Not because it suddenly becomes a great film, because it doesn’t. It’s uneven, the pacing is off, and the performances are laughably hammy. But there’s something interesting about it. You can see the idea that would later become something much more refined, and you can see people trying to do something ambitious with very little to work with.
It ends up feeling like a rough version of something that would later be done properly, but that doesn’t make it pointless. If anything, it makes it more interesting to watch, especially if you already like Predator. You start spotting the similarities, the little overlaps, the ways the idea was already there before it was fully realised.
If you’ve got the time and you don’t mind something a bit messy, it’s worth watching. Just go in knowing what it is. It’s not… good, but it’s not trying to be anything more than it is. It’s got enough in it to keep you interested, and there’s something quite enjoyable about watching a film that feels like it accidentally laid the groundwork for something much bigger a few years later.
Will I be watching it every night? No. But you should give it a go, even if it’s just once.
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Tom Baker
I like Star Wars, heavy metal and BBQ Pringles.
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