Lynn Theel | Through the Shattered Lens

1980’s Without Warning opens with a father (Cameron Mitchell) and his gay son (Darby Hinton) on a hunting trip. The father taunts his son about not being what the father considers to be a real man. He says that his son would have no chance of surviving in the wilderness.

“Why does it always have to be like this?” the son asks with a sincerity that will break your heart.

Suddenly, a bloodsucking starfish flies through the air, lands on the father, and starts to suck out his blood with a phallic stinger. The father dies while his son watches. The son picks up his rifle and prepares to fight back. This will be the son’s chance to prove that his father was incorrect. This is the son’s chance to prove that he can survive in the wilderness and….

Just kidding. The son forgot to load the rifle and promptly gets a starfish to the eye.

That’s the type of film that Without Warning is. Characters are introduced. The majority of them are played by B-actor who have seen better days. They get a few minutes of character development. Then, they die and the viewer is left feeling a bit depressed because they all seemed like they deserved just a bit more screentime than they received. Larry Storch shows up as a boy scout leader who gets a starfish to the back while trying to light a cigarette. Neville Brand, Ralph Meeker, and Sue Anne Langdon hang out in a bar and refuse to believe that the Earth has been invaded by blood-sucking starfish. Jack Palance plays a hunter and gas station owner who wants to capture an alien as a trophy. Martin Landau plays Sarge, an unbalanced Vietnam Vet who has been telling people for years that there are aliens out there. Everyone laughed at old Sarge but they won’t be laughing for long! At the time this film was made, Palance was a two-time Oscar nominee. He finally won his Oscar for City Slickers, a decade after Without Warning. Martin Landau, for his part, won his Oscar 15 years after Without Warning. Good for them. If nothing else, this movie should remind everyone who has dismissed Eric Roberts’s chances that there’s still time!

That said, none of these familiar faces are the stars of the film. Instead, the majority of the film follows four teenagers on a road trip, Sandy (Tarah Nutter), Greg (Christopher S. Nelson), Beth (Lynn Theel), and Tom (David Caruso). David Caruso as a sex-crazed teenager sounds more amusing than it actually is. If anything, the sight of him wearing shorts and t-shirt is almost blinding. (As a fellow redhead, I sympathize. We burn but we don’t tan.) Tom and Beth die early on, leaving Greg and Sandy to try to escape from the alien (Kevin Peter Hall) who is tossing around the starfish. Both characters are pretty generic but Christopher Nelson is at least likable.

Without Warning has a reputation for being the best film that Greydon Clark ever directed and I would agree that it’s one of his better ones, though I prefer The Forbidden Dance. Then again, when you consider some of the other films that Clark directed, it’s easy to see that Without Warning didn’t exactly have a huge bar to clear. Though the script borrows a bit too much from nearly every other horror film ever made, Without Warning is nicely paced and the killer starfish are genuinely frightening and their bloodsucking is almost Cronenbergian in its ick factor. Just as he would for John Carpenter, cinematographer Dean Cundey gives us some nicely eerie shots of the alien. Landau and Palance go all out, understanding that subtlety has no place in a film like this. Without Warning is a dumb B-movie but it’s definitely entertaining.

Without Warning (1980, dir by Greydon Clark, DP: Dean Cundey)

Welcome to Late Night Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing CHiPs, which ran on NBC from 1977 to 1983. The entire show is currently streaming on Freevee!

This week, Ponch and Baker hit the beach!

Episode 1.15 “Surf’s Up”

(Dir by Georg Fenady, originally aired on January 19th, 1978)

At the beginning of this week’s episode, Ponch and Baker are miserable.

Los Angeles, the city that they’ve taken an oath to protect, is no longer as friendly as it once was. The highways are congested. The chases are long and tedious. The citizens don’t seem to appreciate the highway patrol’s hard work. When Baker is forced to throw a reckless driver on someone else’s hood in order to arrest him, the owner of the car (Fran Ryan) yells at him for scratching her car and threatens to sue the department.

Ponch and Baker need a break!

At first, Getraer is dismissive of their concerns. He points out, quite sensibly, that he can’t approve their request for a temporary transfer just because they’re having a bad day. They work in Los Angeles and not every day is going to be a perfect day.

“Thanks a lot, pal,” Ponch snaps.

“I’m your sergeant,” Getraer starts, “if you want a pal….”

“Join the Police Athletic League, we know,” Baker says.

Fortunately, for Ponch and John, the Malibu division has a few men who have gotten the flu so Getraer, realizing that he doesn’t want to have to listen to Ponch and Jon whine for a whole week, finally agrees to giving them a temporary transfer.

The rest of the episode follows Ponch and John as they patrol Malibu. It turns out that Malibu has the same problems as Los Angeles but it’s also closer to the beach. (“You can hear the ocean from headquarters!” an excited Ponch says.) Not only do Ponch and Baker stop a car theft (and save the baby who was trapped in the back seat) but they also catch a gang of van thieves. Ponch also takes a few kids from the neighborhood to Disneyland, in order to make up for having incorrectly accused one of them of having stolen a radio and bunch of sunflowers.

Of course, we don’t actually see Ponch at Disneyland. We just hear about afterwards. What we do see is Ponch and Baker hanging out on the beach and trying out a jet ski. As I watched this episode, it occurred to me that CHiPs really wasn’t a police show as much as it was an hour long commercial for California. The theme of this episode appeared to be, “Even if Los Angeles is too crowded and smoggy for you, you can still go to Malibu, meet and date two flight attendants, and conquer the ocean on a jet ski!” And really, this show is at its most effective when it focuses on being a travelogue. I imagine quite a few people watched this episode in 1978 and thought to themselves, “I have to get to Malibu!”

Scenery aside, this is a bit of a dull episode. The van thieves were not particularly impressive villains and even the show’s famous chase scenes felt a bit perfunctory. As a drama, this episode fell flat but it worked wonderfully as a commercial.