Summer of Slash: Without Warning

In light of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus – and whether or not it is or isn’t a good/faithful extension to his horror/sci-fi/slasher Alien – I figured I’d kick off the Summer of Slash this year with a film obviously influenced by Scott’s seminal film. Greydon Clark’s Without Warning (also known by its more apropos drive-in title It Came Without Warning) has very much in common in with Alien (and what horror/sci-fi hybrid post-1979 didn’t) in that it plays more like a slasher than a straight science fiction film about alien invaders. As I like to point out often in these Summer of Slash entries, there are a lot of films that pre-date Friday the 13^th that give us a sense of what the commercialized slasher film would eventually become. Without Warning is interesting not because it’s necessarily an effective slasher movie (or even a good sci-fi movie – it is, though, an extremely likeable, goofy lark), but because it was made around the same time Friday the 13^th was (Without Warning, then it would seem, just as Friday, would owe a great deal to Bava’s Bay of Blood) and predates by seven years Predator, the film it most obviously reminds the viewer of with its alien hunter throwing killer Frisbees around for sport (an interesting link to Predator is found in Kevin Peter Hall who also plays the alien here).

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