Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Without Warning

In this classic episode of Weirdhouse Cinema, Rob and Joe discuss "Without Warning," a perfectly serviceable sci-fi horror film directed by Greydon Clark. The year is 1980 and only a delusional Martin Landau and a Captain Ahab-esque Jack Palance can stop an extraterrestrial killer from treating rural California as its own personal hunting ground. (originally published 10/30/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, Welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 2 (00:10):
And this is Joe McCormick, and today we're bringing you
an episode from the Weird House Cinema vault. This was
actually our first Weird House Cinema episode ever. It was
on the movie Without Warning, a Graydon Clark classic about
an alien running around in the fields of Where's it.
I guess it's in rural California?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Maybe yep?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
Yeah. So this originally aired on October thirtieth, twenty twenty.
It was our first ever Weird House Cinema episode when
we didn't know what Weird House Cinema would be yet.
I think we were still trying to figure it out.
So I wonder what kind of weird little appendages and
vestigial organs there will be to fined in this episode.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Let's dig right in and find out.

Speaker 3 (00:50):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Hey, Welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob and
this is Joe. Oh were we not saying our last
names here?

Speaker 2 (01:07):
That's a change.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
Oh you know, No, I guess we should say our
last names.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Okay, well, you're Rob Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. That's it.
That sound okay, let's go with that. Okay, So it
looks like this is our pilot episode. We're recording this
here as a test. It may or may not see
the light of day, but if you're listening to it,
it obviously did.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Now, we originally explored the idea of this being a
standalone podcast series, but then we realize now the perfect
place to try and roll this out would be like
late night on a Friday, like at midnight, if they'd
let us do that. I don't think they can let
us do that, but at any rate, Yeah, this is
kind of a little bonus episode. It is not core

(01:46):
Stuff to Blow your Mind content, but we are featuring
it in the Stuff to Blow Your Mind feed on Fridays.
I like to think of it as the asexual budding
offspring of our science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
where really, we've frequently over the years brought up various
weird movies, generally as a means of sort of illustrating
a particular scientific topic or making a particular scientific topic

(02:10):
maybe a little more engaging, at least to us. So
this is just more of the same, except we're putting
the cart in front of the horse here. We're putting
the movie weirdness ahead of any other concerns that would
otherwise be engaged.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
That's right. We're putting the jack palance in front of
the horse here because for our inaugural episode here we
are going to be talking about, without warning, a film
from nineteen eighty that is so exquisite. I could not
have asked for a better opening episode. Robert, you suggested
this film, having not seen it yourself, I believe. But

(02:48):
when I laid eyes on the trailer, I knew it
was going to be love at first sight, and my
heart was true once I saw it. This film holds up.
This is b trash for the ages. All right, let's
go ahead and a taste for this film. Let's listen
to the trailer in its entirety.

Speaker 4 (03:05):
The hunting season has begun, but the hunter isn't human, only.

Speaker 5 (03:14):
The prey are. It came without warning. It's like nothing
on this earth, our friends.

Speaker 1 (03:27):
I did.

Speaker 4 (03:30):
Beyond any known terror, because one that leaves this planet,
no one may be left alive.

Speaker 1 (03:41):
Good Time warned you.

Speaker 5 (03:43):
When they start eating you, don't come to me for help.
He came out here a spot you want to hear
some about.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Eutrope is right now, you and me, we.

Speaker 4 (03:59):
Are the prize, the hotter, the hunted house, not true,
the thing that praise on human fear and feeds on
human flesh from deepest space. It came, and now man

(04:24):
is the endangered species. It came without warning, and now
it's coming for you.

Speaker 1 (04:40):
Wow. That was something. It's pretty wonderful for a number
of reasons we're going to discuss in this episode, but
for me personally, one of the things I liked about
it is that while on the Internet is a wonderful
means of discovering new weird films. You know, everything from
B movies and exploitation films to art films and even
blockbusters that didn't quite bust the block back in the day,

(05:05):
that sort of thing. But this is a film that
I discovered the old fashioned way on a video rental shelf.
I went to Atlanta's own video drome. I was perusing
the horror and science fiction and there it was.

Speaker 2 (05:18):
A video drome is the holy temple of this show.
It's been a sight of pilgrimage for us for quite
some time. Yeah, and it's great that they're still operating
even during these are dark times by a wonderful sort
of exchange system that operates out of a table at
the front door. And so you can just walk right
up to him and say, give me something disgusting that

(05:38):
reminds you of The Uninvited by Graydon Clark, and you
may well get without warning.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
Yes, because this is a directed by great on Clark
all of that film, and we'll touch based on him
in a bit. But before we get any further, Joe,
do you want to summarize this film for us? Give
us a quick breakdown of the plot.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Okay, Well, the short version is that, without warning, this
is a movie that came out in nineteen eighty and
it's Predator before Predator. When did the Schwarzenegger Predator come out,
like eighty seven, eighty eight something like that.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
Yeah, I believe so.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yeah, So this is Predator before Predator, except instead of
a bug mouth gadget alien with like a laser cannon
and dreadlocks, this is a fifty style big head alien,
sort of a cross between the creepy clay monsters from
Fire in the Sky and then just full camp Martians
like the ones in Invasion of the saucer Men, big head,

(06:34):
a large alien compound eye is kind of a screeching
a mouth. Does it make a noise? I think maybe
at some point does the invasion of the Body Snasher screech?

Speaker 1 (06:45):
Yeah, it makes some sort of an animal noise at
some point.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
Oh yeah. And so instead of taking place in a
vague Central American war zone, this is set somewhere in
I think it's supposed to be the rural western US.
I would guess rural California. And instead of Arnold Schwarzenegger
and his team of commandos, you've got whiny hunters. You've
got boy scouts who just sing incessantly, you've got makeout

(07:09):
point tines, and you've got Jack Palance. And Jack Palance,
by the way, is a force of nature. In this movie,
he plays a hunter. I guess half the characters are
supposed to be hunters of some kind or another. We'll
get to that more when we talk about the themes
and message of the film later on. But Jack Palance
is some kind of hunter who likes to kill animals,

(07:30):
put their heads on the wall of his gas station,
put them in jars, put them in formaldehyde. And when
he talks in this film, he is human cocaine. Half
of his lines are delivered literally quivering.

Speaker 1 (07:43):
Yeah, there is a leathery intensity to this performance that,
to a certain extent, you would expect from Palance. But yeah,
he really brings it. There's not a sense that he
missed call and phoned it in.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
But as for the basic plot, there's an alien who's here.
It's hunting humans. It does hunt humans, including some of
the actors that we're going to mention in just a minute.
As it hunts them, it collects them and puts them
in a water utility shed. I guess that is functioning
as this temporary like food storage locker. I think there's

(08:18):
the implication that the alien is going to eat the people.
I don't know if that's ever made entirely clear, but
I recall that being suggested.

Speaker 1 (08:25):
And there's a lot of wonderful mystery about exactly what
the alien is doing and why, which really works but
yet also leads to you wondering is this for food?
It might be for food, or are they trophies, perhaps
their trophies, or is there something else in play here?
And we're just taking our own human practices and sort
of holding them up over the extraterrestrial pattern in front

(08:48):
of us.

Speaker 2 (08:48):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so this alien is hunting humans.
It doesn't use technology really at all that I can
think of. There. Like I said, there's no laser cannon,
there are no extending wrist blades, there are no magical
flying circular saw discs. Instead, it uses what I would
call a jellyfish shuriken. It throws these little biological creatures

(09:15):
that attach to people and then stab into the people
with their tentacles and make the people bleed and then
kill them. Is that about right?

Speaker 1 (09:24):
That pretty much. I like to think of them as
fresh frisbees, but I think murder pancakes would also suffice.

Speaker 2 (09:32):
Frisbee from the seafood market.

Speaker 1 (09:34):
Yeah. So basically, this tall, big headed alien, which, by
the way, I want to stress this is a nineteen
eighties movie, a nineteen eighty film, which is key because
you certainly expect that kind of a big headed alien
in these older in decades pro prior, especially stuff like
outer limits and so forth. But this is eighty. There
is a Star Wars beach blanket that shows up in

(09:56):
the film, and so there's something about the weirdness of that.
This creature is not only from a different world, he's
from a different cinematic world, so he feels even more
the outsider, but unlike those other cinematic big headed aliens. Yeah,
he's throwing these flesh frisbees around, and if one of
these flesh frisbees attaches to your flesh, you're probably doomed.

(10:19):
You have, like it seems like a few seconds in
the movies, time to whip out a bowie knife and
cut that sucker free. Otherwise you're done for.

Speaker 2 (10:28):
Though nobody seems to have that insight except Jack Palance himself.
Everybody else who gets hit by one of the fresh frisbees. Wait,
are we going with fresh frisbees or flesh frisbees?

Speaker 1 (10:38):
Either way, fresh flesh frisbees.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
Okay, one of the jellyfish meat frisbees attaches to you.
Everybody else just goes oh and then goo comes out
of them and they fall over. But Jack Palance, Yeah,
of course he whips out his knife because I guess
he's got more grit than any of the other ones,
and he has the courage and the resolve to just
stack a right in there and get it off like

(11:02):
he's shucking an oyster.

Speaker 1 (11:03):
Yeah, yeah, there is very much. There's an oyster shucking
sense to these things. See, it's never explained if the
thing is the flesh frisbee, it kills you so fast
because it's like draining your essence or sucking your blood out,
or if it's like a toxin situation. But it seems
to work really well, and the movie does a good
job of conveying that sense of danger.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, and I got the sense of a toxin from
it because the flesh frisbee, the fresh flesh frisbee, is
also very greasy. You know, it's like got this ooze
that when Jack Palance stabs into it with his linoleum
knife or whatever, it produces this oleaginous extrusion that is
I don't know, it looks like it would not come
out with water alone. You would need you know, googne

(11:46):
or something to get rid of it. And we'll come
back to that in just a little bit when we
explore some monster science. But maybe first we should look
at a cast of characters and associated artisans.

Speaker 1 (11:58):
Yeah, well, let's start at the top. I with director
Graydon Clark not to be confused with tad artist Great Anus,
and I have personally made that confusion confusing these two.
But Graydon Clark is perhaps best known, I think for
directing Aimed Angel's Brigade back in nineteen seventy nine, but
also the MST three k riffed Final Justice with Joden

(12:19):
Baker back in nineteen eighty five.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
Oh, that's the one with a dyspeptic Jodon Baker and
he's running around Malta, right.

Speaker 1 (12:26):
Yes, yeah, cowboy. It has some wonderful There's this one
shot in that film where he has his hand on
his hip and they're shoot it like between his arm
and the side of his Torso it's one of my
favorite bizarre shooting choices I've ever seen in a film.

Speaker 2 (12:41):
I also recall a joke about a felonious monk in it.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, But so, Graydon Clark directed another film that came
out in nineteen eighty seven, which that might be the
same year that Predator came out, or maybe Predator was
eighty nine, I don't know. In eighty seven, Graydon Clark
made the movie un in I keep pointing to call
it the Uninvited. I think there's no article. It's just Uninvited,
which is about a mutant cat that gets aboard a

(13:08):
yacht with klu Gooliger and George Kennedy and a bunch
of some more makeout point teams.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Basically, yeah, I haven't seen that one yet, but it's
definitely on my love for this October.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Yeah, Robert, it is a top tier creature film you've
got to see uninvited, and in fact that should be
a later, later addition to the show because it is.
It is a creature film like none other. It is
really unparalleled genius. It Dwelleth at the top of the
creature film Zigarat.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
All right, well, okay, so we've got Clark on board here.
Another key individual makeup artist Greg Cannum. I now I
should note that that sometimes Rick Baker's name is attached
to this film. Apparently he was involved in the film
early on and actually made the alien head and designed
some of the effects and then handed duties off to

(14:00):
fellow FX makeup with Greg Cannum and Canum ends up
completing everything. Canum is another superstar of special effects makeup.
He went on to work on everything from brom Stoker's
Dracula and Highlander two to most recently, I believe he
was involved in that Christian Bale, Dick Cheney makeup for

(14:22):
that movie Vice.

Speaker 2 (14:23):
Oh wow wow, Okay, well I see the through line. Actually,
did he do the old man makeup for Connor MacLeod
and Highlander two? And did he do the old man
makeup for Gary Oldman in bram Stoker's Dracula and the
old man makeup for Christian Bale and Vice?

Speaker 1 (14:40):
I would bet that that is the case.

Speaker 2 (14:42):
Yes, three extraordinary works, each of each of their own genre,
as long as you consider that the stuff they put
on Christoph Lambert is supposed to be oily looking and funny.

Speaker 1 (14:54):
Now, of course, the thing about effects in a film
like this is they can look amazing, but it also
comes down to how you shoot them and indeed how
you light them. Oh, and that leads to our next
future superstar that was involved in this picture.

Speaker 2 (15:07):
Yeah, Dean Coundy. So, Dean Coundy is a legendary cinematographer
and director of photography. He's he's a member of the ASC.
If you just think about a movie that is effortlessly
visually absorbing, something that is constantly pleasing and interesting to
look at without really calling attention to itself as flashy photography,

(15:31):
and I think that there is a good chance that
you're watching a Dean Coundy movie.

Speaker 1 (15:35):
Yeah. Now, I have to say with this film, it
doesn't start off feeling like Cundy's presence is there, because
early on in the film, everything is in just stark daylight.
You just you wake up late and arrive in this
movie around noon in lovel California, so everything has hungover
to yeah, a little bit hungover. Everything's just super bright.

(15:58):
It looks like it's probably hot and you should maybe
be in a library somewhere or you want to crawl
back into a trailer or something. So you know, that's
the first section of the film. But eventually the sun
goes down, and when the sun goes down in this movie,
Kundy's lighting comes up, and that's when everything begins to
take on an entirely new feel because that's when we

(16:21):
see more and more of the monster. But then we
also see more and more of these kind of and
really at times monstrous character actor faces that are also
lit up just so well. Some of the best scenes
in the film are just character actors well lit.

Speaker 2 (16:37):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I would actually go
disagree just a little bit that I think there's some
really good photography and the film has a good look,
even in some of the daylight scenes. I definitely agree
that it becomes more interesting to look at once you
get to the nighttime. But there are a couple of
daylight scenes that remind me of scenes in Halloween. Of course,
Dean Kundy famously worked with John Carpenter on movies like

(16:57):
Halloween and the thing remember in Halloween how there will
be these scenes that are just in broad daylight, and
it'll be a creepy wide shot with Michael Myers standing
somewhere in the distance and not really moving or doing
anything all that menacing. He's just there in the mid
ground background. And those are I think some of the

(17:18):
most effective shots in Halloween. They really color how you
experience the film. There are shots like that in Without
Warning too. There's like a shot where a hunter is
looking around at a field just with kind of like
dead grass and overgrown weeds, and there is some figure
with a large head just kind of standing in the
distance behind the tall grass, not moving, and I thought

(17:41):
it was an incredibly effective shot for such a low
grade movie.

Speaker 1 (17:44):
Yeah, yeah, I do admit that some of those daylight
scenes are creepy in that they convey that sense of
the terror that stalks in the daylight is perhaps even
more dangerous than that which stalks at night.

Speaker 2 (17:57):
But I agree in general Dean Coundy, he's just got
the magic touch, and it's especially magic once night comes
on and he's messing around with lighting. There are scenes
that are filmed inside a house, a sort of a
hunting cabin where there is a sudden boo scare where
the alien pops out from the corner of a room
and I think points with his finger. Very again, very
invasion of the body snatcher's style, but it's a very

(18:20):
effective boo scare.

Speaker 1 (18:21):
Actually, yeah, I have to throw in that the Shout
Factory Scream Factory edition of this movie that came out
on DVD and Blu Ray several years back has some
special features, and one of them is Kundy talking about
the film, and it's really insightful. He for instance, brings
up the fact that the monster costume looked really good

(18:43):
and you had this maybe temptation to want to show
a lot of it, but he held back. And you know,
you depend on a little bit more shadow and mystery,
So there are certain details on that monster head that
you just don't necessarily get in the final feature like
it has kind of compound eye is yes, and you
never complete. I don't think you ever get a sense
of that in the film, but ultimately you don't need

(19:05):
it because great costume plus great lighting equals great experience.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah, I agree. Yeah, the monster is often in shadow,
and this actually works to great effect. Again, it's a
common feature you see when people are talking about Dean
Kundy movies on the internet. I think a lot of
times they don't even know that they're The reason they're
saying this is that it's a Dean Kundy movie. But
you see this thing in reviews over and over, a
sentence like this trashy b movie is much more watchable

(19:33):
than it has any right to be. I think it's
that's just Dean, that's Dean work and his stuff, and
a lot of it has to do with lighting and
good framing and pleasant cinematography. I don't know if pleasants
the right word, but it's interesting to look at, you know,
it's visually not boring.

Speaker 1 (19:50):
Speaking of visually not boring, we've already touched on Jack
Palance's presence in this, and I think one of the
key things about Jack Palance, again, the intense. He is great,
but there is an inherent weirdness that Palance brings to
any picture, whether you're looking at a blockbuster film that
he was in. You know, if you're looking at you
could be looking at City Slickers or Batman or Shane

(20:11):
or Outlaw of Gore or anything like when he shows up, Like,
if there's nothing else weird about the film, Palance is
the weirdness.

Speaker 2 (20:19):
It's like he's always just about to start telling you
about his erotic model train hobby. It's just he's got
secrets and they're bursting out, they're about to leak out
of his face.

Speaker 1 (20:32):
I should also add that Palance has this kind of
captain ahab vibe throughout the film too, so you're you're
never really sure if you can trust him him, You're
not really sure if you can trust the character. And
I think there's there's something about that that Palance brings
to most films, like he is you look, just look
at him, and this is not leading man, This is
not the hero. This is a potential villain at least.

(20:55):
And so yeah, he really feels like this tweener character.

Speaker 2 (20:58):
Yeah, I agree with that. You walk into him his
gas station and he starts talking to you about hunting
and that sort of thing. You don't know if you
can rely on him when he later shows up in
the dark with a gun.

Speaker 1 (21:09):
Yeah. Now, one of the beautiful things about this film
is that Jack Palance is not the only creepy old
man character played by an established character actor, because we
also have Martin Landau in this picture.

Speaker 2 (21:21):
No, they really swung for the bleachers, I mean with
the casting here, so it's got Martin Landel. Also Martin Landel,
I'd say one of my favorite old character actors. He
gives one of the best movie performances of all time
playing Bella Legosi. And Tim Burton's ed Wood. I've kind
of you know, I hate to talk smack, but I've

(21:43):
kind of gotten tired of Tim Burton movies in the
modern era. But when you go back to some of
the Tim Burton stuff from the nineties, it's so lively
and fantastic, and ed Wood is one of the best
examples of that. Of course, it's about a schlock movie
maker himself. What's his name, Edward? No, no, no, I
mean no, who plays Edwood? What's about the actor? The

(22:06):
actor Johnny Depp? So yeah, yeah, Johny dep Yeah, yeah, sorry,
Johnny Depp plays Edward and of course, late in life, Edwood,
the schlock filmmaker, actually did form a relationship with the
great actor Bella Lagosi and cast him in some of
his films, and this is portrayed in the movie, with
Martin Landau playing Bella Lagosi as a kind of tired,

(22:27):
washed up, ornery version of himself.

Speaker 1 (22:30):
A quick note, Martin Landau has a lot of vampire
in the family because not only did he play Bella Lagosi,
but his daughter Susan Finch was one of the producers
of bron Stokers of Dracula, and his other daughter Juliet
played Drusella on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
Oh, we've looked that up before when we were watching Buffy. Yeah,
I remember we discovered that fact and it was just
a delight. Martin Landau is so lovable as Bella, and
even in this movie where he's not playing a lovable character,
he's somehow lovable anyway.

Speaker 1 (23:00):
Yeah, and I guess it's more of a like his
character goes the way you really expect Palance's character to go,
because he plays this character named Sarge, who's a like
an army vet I guess we're supposed to believe, and
he we learned increasingly learned that he has some some
serious psychological baggage. And so even though he is aware

(23:25):
that there's some sort of alien presence in the local
area causing mischief, he heaps like additional conspiracy theory on
top of that, additional like psychotic thinking where he he
believes also that the alien might be in disguising itself
with various people that they you know, there's a real
conspiracy going on when there isn't, but it may makes

(23:47):
for a sort of a sort of a surprise villain
in the film.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah, it's he's he plays the unfortunate role of like
the teens. Okay, maybe we should actually summarize the plot
a little bit more to get up to this point. So, so,
like it starts off with there are a pair of
hunters who are out hunting. There's this older hunter played
by Cameron Mitchell we can talk about in a minute.
And then he's got this younger son with a mustache
who doesn't like hunting and doesn't want to be outdoors

(24:12):
and it's just whining. And then they both get killed
by the alien. Okay, it's your classic you know, prolog
a slaughter in a horror movie, right, And then you've
got the makeout point teens who show up in a
van there, you know, the classic teens from the city.
They want to go swimming at the lake and so
they're hanging out in their bathing suits in their van.
They stop at the gas station that I believe belongs

(24:35):
to Jack Palance to get gas presumably, but they end
up going in the bathroom and running into Martin Landau
as Sarge, who's kind of creepy, and then just disappears.
And then they make it to the lake and then
the slaughtering starts. The alien praise on one of the
one couple of the teens, and then the other couple
of teens run for help at a local bar, and

(24:58):
then on once they're at the bar, the run into
Sarge and they're saying there's an alien trying to kill us,
and Sarge believes them, but unfortunately he also I think,
ends up believing that they are aliens themselves.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yeah, which is ultimately a clever idea like having the
two old men, creepy old men that you run into
one is going to be more and more of a
benefit than the other by far right. But Landau does
a great job in this, brings a real kind of
crazy intensity to it. And you know, I don't know
that I remember seeing him play as much of like
a deranged villain character before in a film. A lot

(25:32):
of the things I'd seen him in he was more
of a really more of a leading man or hero.
I finally remember him on the seventies TV show Space
nineteen ninety nine, which was rerun like crazy at one
point in the nineties on the Sci Fi Channel.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
He's actually in a really great old episode of The
Twilight Zone where I believe he plays some kind of
Eastern Bloc agent who's trying to defect in one episode,
and he is being pursued by assassins in the company
that he's trying or from the country that he's trying
to defect from, and they have booby trapped his hotel
room with a bomb, and so it's his job to

(26:10):
try to figure out where the bomb in the room is.
And it's a nice tight little bottle episode. All right.

Speaker 1 (26:23):
So, so Landau's great in this, But let let's talk
about some of the other actors here. You have Kevin
Peter Hall playing the monster, the Hunter itself, and Hall
is a legendary monster player who most ironically went on
to play the Predator in both Predator one and two.

Speaker 2 (26:42):
So this is where things almost get kind of suspicious,
and you wonder, like, I don't know about the screenwriters
who wrote Predator, but did they actually watch this movie?
Were they actually just ripping it off?

Speaker 1 (26:54):
I don't know. I mean, I think we'll get into
that a little bit when we discussed like the ideas
behind it, sort of the the mythic underpinnings of the film.
But maybe Kevin Peter Hall also played some other monsters
during his time. He sadly died in nineteen ninety one,
but before then he played the Newtant Bear in the

(27:14):
nineteen seventy nine film Prophecy. He also played Harry and
Harry in The Henderson's Heart Eyes Bulging, Yeah Yeah. And
he was Big John in Big Top Peewee.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
Yeah. So famously a very tall actor, great, you know,
great presence for creature type roles, and you know what
I got to say, his body performance as the Predator
in the Predator film kind of makes it.

Speaker 1 (27:36):
I know.

Speaker 2 (27:36):
Originally they had cast Jean Claude Van Dam to play
the predator and no offense to Jean Claude van Dam.
But I don't know if that would have been as
effective in the movie, especially standing next to Arnold Schwarzenegger,
Like if the alien's literally smaller than him.

Speaker 1 (27:50):
Yeah, Like the stature is key, I think, But.

Speaker 2 (27:53):
Also no, he's got a great physicality in the role too,
like the way he moves his arms and his stance
and all that. He really knew how to play non
speaking role.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Now, this movie also gave us a key cinematic debut
the ginger baby Face himself, David Caruso.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
David Caruso, So he plays one of the makeout point
teams in this He's one of the ones that unfortunately
does not make it all the way to the bar.
He and his girlfriend are swimming in the lake. I
think the last time we see them they're literally on
a towel getting ready for some makeout action and then
they just end up later in the waterworks shed. But

(28:32):
so he is, he's very ginger, and he's wearing shorts
in this movie that are so short they inhert the
Axis of Time and Space. I'm like, I can't believe
that people once wore shorts that short.

Speaker 1 (28:47):
Yeah, yeah, it's crazy. He would of course go on
to make a career out of playing mostly cops and
detectives and occasionally criminals who basically seem like cops. But
that's his point. He was only twenty four four years
old and he just plays a horny teen who gets
himself killed by an alien.

Speaker 2 (29:03):
Yeah. But then also we have a veteran character actor,
Cameron Mitchell, who I mentioned that earlier. He's in the prologue.
He's one of the hunters who gets killed at the
beginning of the movie. And I must admit, the whole
time I was watching him in the prologue, I thought
he was Jack Palance because he kind of looks like him.

Speaker 1 (29:22):
He has his face does a very similar thing to Palances,
like you just do not trust it. You know that
something is up when Cameron Mitchell like Locke's Eyes with you.

Speaker 2 (29:34):
For fans of Mystery Science Theater three thousand, Cameron Mitchell
is maybe best known for playing the Santa Claus guy
in Space Mutiny. He's the old man with the white beard.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
Yeah, but that's one of the Ultimately I feel like
it's such a disservice because that was probably the first
thing I saw him in and where in which I
recognized him as Cameron Mitchell. But generally he just plays
heavies and villains. And so if you watch most of
his works from before for Space Mutiny, those are the
kind of characters he plays, like dangerous men, unsavory characters.

(30:07):
And here again he plays an unsavory character who is
at one point just going to murder his own son
because he doesn't like hunting in the outdoors.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
Because he doesn't like hunting. That is the reason we're given.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
Yeah, But anyway, Cameron Mitchell always of an interesting presence
in a film he worked. He worked with Mario Bava
a lot, for example. But I have also found that
nobody dies ten minutes into a film quite like Cameron Mitchell.
He has pulled this in other films. He's got a
real dirty rat face. Yeah. Now, a few other just
older actors have noted here. Larry Storch shows up as

(30:43):
a scout master. Neville Brand plays one of the drunks
in the bar, and he's another one of these character
acts with just a real landslide of a face, just
a total character actor, who, by the way, played the
killer in Toby Hooper's Eaten Alive from seventy six.

Speaker 2 (30:59):
Oh, the movie with the Gator hotel.

Speaker 1 (31:01):
I think that's the one is like the cover is
like he it's the cover is just a Neville brand
with a big sickle or something. Yeaheah.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
I think that's right. I could be wrong, but yeah,
so he's great. I must say one of the other teens,
the male teen who survives longer into the movie. I
hate to bring politics into it, but it's Scaramucie. He's
baby Scaramouccie. That's exactly what he looks like. Maybe sort
of a cross between him and Casper van Deen. He's

(31:32):
got that van Den, sort of like a forest creature.

Speaker 1 (31:37):
I I have to say that both of the teens
that last the longest in the film. Those actors, I
think were mainly stunt workers. But I thought they did
a fine job as far as like teen leads in
a horror movie from nineteen eighty go, I have no
problem with them at all. I thought they did a
pretty good job.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Yeah, neither of them appears to have done all that
much else. The girl who is sort of comes the
final girl in the movie. She is played by an
actress named Tara Nutter, who I saw was also in
some movie with Ron Howard about an evil company that's
poisoning farmland.

Speaker 1 (32:13):
Okay, yeah, not a.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Hugely extensive acting career. Well, maybe now we should get
infuriatingly granular about the physical reality imagined by this film.

Speaker 1 (32:25):
Yes, it's time for a little monster science, because ultimately,
this is often the case if you have a suitably
weird creature, monster, or even just monstrous scenario in a film,
there's we always found that there's generally something in nature
that is as weird, if not weirder. And this is
the same it's going to be said about this film.

(32:45):
So we already touched on the fact that, unlike the predator,
this hunter doesn't use technology to hunt its prey. No,
it uses other organisms. That uses flesh, frisbees. I mean,
presumably there are other organisms. I guess it's possible that
it is like hatching these from its chest and then
collecting them in its purse or satchel and then flinging

(33:06):
them out. But I think the predominant interpretation, the fair interpretation,
would be that these are other organisms that it has.
Maybe it raises them in a tank somewhere, Maybe it
goes to some weird moon and collects them like like
a mushroom harvester. But at any rate, it comes to
Earth with a sack of these things looking for a
good hunt.

Speaker 5 (33:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Yeah, the jellyfish shirocin as I mentioned. I think maybe
you could think of them as technology, but they're definitely
not like inert mechanical technology. If there are technology at all,
their biotechnology. These things are definitely alive in some way.
They ooze, They're full of oleaginous you know, substances. They
got like little tentacles that poke out. They squeal, I

(33:49):
think when you stab them. So they're definitely alive in
some way. And yeah, I was curious about the same thing.
Are these like part of him, part of the Hunter
in some way? We don't. I don't think we ever
see them come off of his body in the movie.
He just throws them.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
Yeah, they come out of a satchel or purse.

Speaker 2 (34:06):
Yeah. Yeah, So it makes me think maybe there's some
kind of organism that he has collected from the natural
world on his home planet, or like you say, like
a moon or something. They made me think. Actually, I
recall back in the very first half Life game, there
was a weapon you could get. There were basically these
little alien rats and I don't remember exactly what they

(34:27):
were called, but you get like a bag of these
alien rats and you could kind of throw them into
a room and they'd run around and attack whatever was
in the room. But if you ran into the room yourself,
you were also vulnerable to them. They could like turn
around and attack you. And I wondered if the same
thing would be true of the flesh frisbees in this movie,
like could they turn against their master. I don't think

(34:49):
we see a character try to employ that method, but
we never see it work.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, she didn't really have a good throwing arm on her. No.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
So, one thing about these projectiles that I I was
looking for biological parallels to is the fact that they
are so obviously slimy and oleaginous. Right, they look greasy.
You get repeated close ups of the slime and the
mucus they produce, and it looks oily to me. It
looks like you need some good soap or something to

(35:17):
get it off. And as a point of comparison in
the natural world, I do want to mention a very
alarming grease throwing animal, which is a type of petrol,
a kind of bird of the southern half of the
world which projects a greasy slime vomit against other birds
as a defensive tactic. The most the bird best known

(35:40):
for this is a type of bird called full mars,
where they will spit out of their mouth a type
of stomach oil that if it gets on the feathers
of an attacking birds an eagle type predator, it makes
it undercuts the feathers ability to be waterproof, and it
hurts their ability to fly. So birds have actually died

(36:03):
because they were spit on with this mucous vomit oil
stuff from the full mar's stomach. They were, in fact
like cases I was reading of where birds like auks
were put in an enclosure with a full bar and
then got vomited on and died. Oh wow, so you
don't want this oil on you. I was also reading

(36:24):
in a post on Scientific American about how sometimes the
chicks of these full mars will just basically spit this
oil at anything that gets close to them, including their
own parents, and they have to like mature out of
that over time, and the parents apparently can defend themselves
by preening by removing it from their feathers with their beaks.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Yeah, I'm looking at a picture of one of these
right now, and it's like a vile orange grease that
seems to be flying out of this creature's mouth.

Speaker 2 (36:51):
You don't want to get the gou on you. And
just like in the movie, you don't want to get
the gou on you. But it also is much more
than goo. It's an organism in itself. And I was
trying to think, you know, are there any animals I
could I could find examples of that threw a more
complex thing like the flesh frisbees in this movie, that
actually does something. I was having trouble finding good examples

(37:14):
of something that actually throws something more than just an
object from its environment or a liquid from its body.

Speaker 1 (37:21):
Yeah, offhand, I can't think of a good example of
that either. Yeah, generally, and animals are going to manipulate,
you know, it's like sand or dirt shell that sort
of thing. But one example that I came across that's
probably the best example of an organism using organisms as
some sort of a tool or indeed some sort of

(37:42):
a weapon, and that is to look at the boxing
crab or palm pob crab found in the genus Libya.
These are little guys. These are like two centimeters or
point seven inches wide, so they're not very big crabs,
but have this wonderful adaptation where they will they will
collect or acquire and that's part of the mystery, these

(38:03):
little anemonies. And they'll have one in each claw and
they'll brandish them, almost like a pair of nunchucks or something.
They will they'll wave them around when they're doing various
displays for other crabs. But they also seem to use
them to collect food. And there's a mutualism in play
here because the anemy gets you know, it's far more

(38:26):
mobile if a crab is carrying it around. But I
was looking at a twenty thirteen study from Barilan University
and they were really getting into how do they acquire
these particular anemonies. And they found that, for instance, if
they lose their anenemy, they may steal one from somebody else.
If they have only one, they'll rip it in half

(38:47):
so that they have two. And that particular study, they
were looking at one variety of boxing crab, and they
pointed out that the variety of anemony that the crab
used had not been found yet in the wild. Now,
that could just mean we just had not found it yet.
There are a lot of organisms in the wild that
we have not fully charged, obviously. But the other possibility

(39:09):
is that it is essentially a domesticated, fully cultivated species
that has henceforth gone extinct in the wild, and it
is only carried on by these crabs that use them
as a sort of tool or weapon.

Speaker 2 (39:24):
It's like an agricultural product of the crab society.

Speaker 1 (39:27):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, you could compare it in that
respect to leafcutter ants and the crop they grow. But yeah,
I love the idea of comparing the boxing crab to
the hunter from without Warning, because it makes you wonder, like,
what kind of evolutionary path led the hunter here? Did
it grow up cultivating its weapon race of deathly flying discs,

(39:48):
and just you know, it ends up being part of
the way it lives its life. Eventually they start making
satchels to carry them in. Maybe at some point they
were like exo parasites that collected on their and then
they started using them offensively. I don't know.

Speaker 2 (40:03):
That would not be the only case in nature of
something that begins as a parasite, but then eventually is
adopted into a kind of mutualism with the host.

Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:12):
In fact, I think that could probably be said to
be the case for a lot of just you know,
the regular microbiota that lives on and in all of us.

Speaker 1 (40:20):
Yeah, I should add that we never see the alien
hunter without his outfit on. If they were to pull
that costume off, perhaps he just covered with him. They
just suckered all over.

Speaker 2 (40:29):
Him, right, or they're just like coming out of a
little like a printer slot in his belly. Now we
mentioned at some point the character played by the actress
Tara Nutter tries to throw one of these things back
at the alien, you know, to turn his weapons against him,
and it fails. She like throws it and it falls
short of him. So you never get the sense that

(40:51):
would it have worked if it had hit him, Like,
if she was able to hit him with this thing,
would it latch on and poison him and do its
thing like it does with humans, or you know know,
is it just like would he be immune to it? Anyway?
The movie does not solve this riddle that itself has posed,
but maybe that would be a good place to talk
about what happens at the end. Of the film because
that's when she throws the disc. So there are various

(41:15):
encounters where the teens are running around. The surviving teens
are being pursued by Martin Landau, who at some point
he gets a police car and he's like driving after
them in it.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
Oh, well, there's this wonderful scene where the police officer
shows up, yeah to save the day, and Sarge shoots
him dead.

Speaker 2 (41:32):
Oh yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (41:34):
And then of course more police come to arrest Sarge.
But then Sarge apparently steals the police vehicle and shows
up in the police car. You think the both the
police are here to save the teens. No, it's Sarge again.

Speaker 2 (41:44):
Yeah. I think Sarge shoots the police officer because he
thinks he's an alien. Yes, And then yeah, so he's
in the police car. He's chasing the teens around. And
then at some point the teens escape and they go
into a hunting cabin or a house, and then the
movie gets kind of quiet for a bit where they're
just chilling out in the house. They're looking around the

(42:05):
baby Scaramushi bruised this pot of coffee and then presumably
drinks it all from it looks like he drinks about
four gallons of coffee and then dies in a chair.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
I remember him going to make the coffee, saying he's
going to stay up all night and protect her. Whyn't
you sleep? And I wanted to be like, oh, sweet,
that's not how coffee works. You can't just brew a
pot of coffee and that's going to keep alone, is
going to keep you up all night?

Speaker 2 (42:30):
Yeah, how much coffee do I need in order to
stay up all night? I would guess about four gallons. Yeah,
that will get me through. So he's dead in a
chair when we find him with a flesh frisbee attached
to his face. So you might assume, okay, the alien
killed him, but it's also quite possible that he just
died of diarrhea from the four gallons of coffee before that,

(42:51):
and then the alien just stuck the flesh frisbee on there,
kind of as an afterthought. But then we get a chase.
The alien is chasing Tera Nutter around and Jack Palin
shows up to help her, and Jack Palance reveals that
he has laid a trap for the alien that now
the aliens shed the former water utility is shed that

(43:11):
has all the dead bodies in it is rigged with
dynamite and they're going to lure the alien back to
the shed and blow him to pieces. And essentially this
process works, except that at some point Sarge shows up
and temporarily foils their plan, and then he gets killed
by the alien. Unfortunately, Jack Palance gets flesh frisbeed a lot,

(43:32):
and no amount of cutting off the flesh frisbees will
save him, so instead he sacrifices himself, charging straight on
at the alien and yelling.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
And you can just tell when they filmed the scene they.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Were looking around at each other thinking like, did we
ever give the alien a name? Does it have a name?
And the answer is no, So he just.

Speaker 1 (43:53):
Yells alien, Yeah it really does. Ultimately have his Captain
Ahab moment. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, from the heart of Hell, I stab at the
I guess from the heart of Hell, I run at
the alien.

Speaker 1 (44:09):
Yah if he presumably pulls it off.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yes, yes, see he grabs the alien around the ankles
and then they blow it to pieces with the dynamite
and the day is saved.

Speaker 1 (44:20):
But that's why Palents didn't get to play Ahab in
a film adaptation to Mobi Dick, because he's like and
then I kill the whale. That's how this goes. And
they're like, no, no, it's not exactly how the novel goes.
And he's like, it doesn't matter. I think a run
it that whale, I take it down.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
I thought you were going to say that's why he
never played Ahab, because he's like, I've already done that role.

Speaker 1 (44:42):
It's perfect.

Speaker 2 (44:43):
No adaptation of Moby Dick could rival without warning. Do
I get to run at the whale? Yelling way? Well,
perhaps we should talk about what is this film trying

(45:04):
to say, if it is trying to say anything. I
do think this one is trying to say something, but
I'm not quite sure it's sure what that is. But
I can tell you it is something about hunting. The
film is clearly a meditation on the theme of hunting,
because the alien is a hunter, and they just really
beat you over the head with it. Almost every single

(45:26):
character talks about hunting.

Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, from the very beginning, like the father and son
are arguing about hunting, like why do you like hunting? Dad?
I don't know, Son, why don't you not like hunting?
So they really kind of to a certain extent, beat
you over the head with it. But at the same time,
after a while, it feels like they're not really sure
what point they're trying to make about hunting. I mean

(45:49):
maybe to an extent, maybe that's good. Like you don't
feel like there's a really heavy handed message to this film.

Speaker 2 (45:56):
Oh sure, I mean I'm not saying that. I think
every film should have a moral that can be stated
in a sentence. Though if this film has any thoughts
in general about hunting, even then I'm not quite sure
what those are. But maybe maybe we'll find something here,
because I wanted to explore these these hunting themes in
literature a little bit and see if we can if

(46:16):
that can inform our vision of the movie. Now, obviously,
stories of divine hunters, like you would say, the alien
in this movie is in a way a divine hunter, right,
it comes down from the sky. It's got superhuman powers,
and it uses them to hunt on earth, but not
just to hunt beasts, to hunt the most dangerous game
of all, which is mad and so obviously, you know,

(46:38):
these stories of divine hunters are just rich throughout ancient mythology.
Most of the myths of hunters, I think, are about
normal hunting. You know, they're humans or humanoid gods who
hunt animals, And then a lot of hunting mythology is
about the relationship between hunters and prey and the gods
who aid hunters in the hunt. But there are a

(47:01):
few myths that sort of turned the tables on the
hunting dynamics in the style of Predator or this movie,
or one of my favorites, the tagline from the for
the nineties movie Congo. You remember that tagline that goes
where you are the endangered species?

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Yeah. I guess it's often pointed out too that modern
twists on this or are all kind of a twist
on a most dangerous game in which you know, humans
are hunting humans. And then in just in sci fi,
like there was an older Isaac Asimov's story in which
there's like a time traveler who gets drunk at a
bar and tells everybody that he traveled back to dinosaur

(47:42):
days and found that reptilian humanoids hunted all the dinosaurs
to extinction. So this idea of alien or alien esque hunters,
you know, certainly predates even this film.

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And other sci fi stories have touched
on hunting themes, of course. I mean the one that
immediately comes to mind as a sound of thunder where
there's time travel again and the idea that but this
is also about humans hunting animals. In that story, the
humans go back, they hunt dinosaurs, and unfortunately in hunting
dinosaurs they create ripple effects throughout time. You know, it's

(48:15):
the butterfly effect explored. But this, of course is the
theme where we're talking here about humans or humanoid gods
being the prey. And I think there are some myths
that sort of get into territory at least close to this.
One example is a number of myths about the Greek

(48:36):
goddess Artemis having various kinds of hunts for humans, or
at least hunting sort of revenge on humans that in
some way resembles a hunt. Artemis. Artemis is an interesting figure,
of course, she is the virgin goddess of the hunt
in Greek mythology. There are some connections between her and

(48:56):
probably older, more ancient goddesses who symbolized something having to
do with fertility in the ancient Near East. But in
Greek mythology, Artemis is very often associated with hunts and
hunting weapons and the wilderness and wild animals. She had
these stags and deer that are sacred to her. She,

(49:18):
like the predator, and like the alien in Without Warning,
has powerful supernatural tools that aid her in the hunt.
So whereas the Predator's got his laser cannon and his
blades and his nets and all those things, and of
course the alien from Without Warning has the flesh frisbees,
Artemis has a silver bow and silver arrows that were

(49:40):
forged by the cyclopes in this underwater realm, and the
arrows of this bow could split a pine tree and
the quiver would always be full. And she also has
a pack of hunting dogs that she acquired from the
god Pan, you know, the little King of the Wood,
which could outrun any deer or outfight any lion. And
there are a number of myths where she sort of

(50:02):
hunts a person or a deity after they've offended her
in some way. I think that probably the best known
of these is the myth of Acteon, right where Acteon
is himself a hunter. He's a young hunter who's traveling
through the forest and he sees Artemis bathing in a
pool or a stream, and he's like wow, And then

(50:22):
she catches him looking at her, and because he saw
her naked, she transforms him into a stag, and then
he is pursued by dogs. I think in most versions
of the story, I think he's pursued by his own
hunting dogs that mistake him for the prey now, and
they catch him and they tear him to pieces. But
I've also seen some version where apparently she hunts him

(50:44):
with her hounds, maybe the hounds of Pan, and they
catch him and rip him apart.

Speaker 1 (50:49):
You know, this is great because on one hand, hunting
dogs are a perfect analog to the flying fresh flesh
for yes, yeah, yeah, biotechnology, domesticated creatures that we send
forth to do our will on the hunt. I wonder
too about you know, obviously, hunting was such an important

(51:10):
part of life, an essential part of life for for
early humans. So it makes sense that this thing that
we depended on, you know, on a daily basis, would
would mingle so with our myth making. But also I
wonder if there's a sense that it that it that
it also reveals, especially for early humans, how delicate our

(51:34):
place in the natural order was. Like in the same
way that has often pointed out that our cats, our
pet cats, are you are extra insane because in the
in the wild, they are both predator and prey, you know,
and and so for early man especially that would have
been the case. There were beasts that would eat us,
just as we had to eat beasts, and and in
doing so, you know, a lot of these myths kind

(51:55):
of uh seem to explore that dual nature that you know,
just but for the will of the goddess, I could
be the creature hunted by these fierce beasts that do
my bidding.

Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, I think that's a natural place to go, and
it's a natural kind of irony to explore, you know.
It's very much that like Avid's metamorphosis territory, you know,
the ironies inherent in the natural order of things. One
of the most obvious kind of ironies you could get
into is the order of the food chain. We're usually
at the top, we're doing all the hunting. But what
if you were the prey, which, in fact, and that's

(52:29):
not even something you have to imagine a magical scenario for, Like,
you know, if you are stranded without tools, without aid
and stuff like that, you could easily become a prey
animal to a lion or something like that. But I
think the strange part comes in the strangeness enters when
you're imagining not just being prey to a wild animal,

(52:49):
but being prey to a human or humanoid hunter.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Yeah. Yeah, being the focus of the hunter's will.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Yeah, because human hunters are different than wild animals. They've got,
you know, these they've got tools, they've got technology like
Artemis does, they've got language, they've got sort of complex
desires and will. That the reason that Artemis might hunt
a human would be not because she desires its meat
to eat, but because she hates it for some reason
it has offended her, and that would be the case

(53:20):
in say, the myth of Niobe again, this one is
it's not a perfect analogy because it's not exactly a hunt,
but the normal version of this myth is that Niobe
is the human daughter of Tantalus and the wife of Amphion,
the king of Thebes, and in a lot of tellings
she boasts in pride that she has more children than

(53:43):
the titan Letto, who is the mother of Apollo and Artemis.
And then Apollo and Artemis get revenge against her for
making this prideful boast against their mother by slaughtering all
of Niobe's children, which is, you know, a very Greek
myth kind of thing to happen. And so the way
it happens is that Artemis showers them with shafts from

(54:03):
her bow while they're in their home, and Apollo takes
the sons of Niobe hunting and kills them all while
on the hunt, and Niobe is left to grieve. So
there is sort of like a hunting inflection in the
revenge plot here.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
Now there's also a sense, especially without warning, there's this
idea too that all right, you bumbling teens have just
wandered into something beyond your comprehension, and now you're stuck
in it. And really we see this as well with
this mythic concept of the doom that comes with interrupting
a divine hunt, such as the wild hunt traditions of

(54:41):
northern Europe. So in these traditions you have gods such
as Odin and or the spirits of hunters past, running
amok across the countryside, often at night with hell hounds
into in pursuit of prey. And that prey might be
a magical or divine heart, you know, some sort of
sacred a deer. It might be demons thereafter, it might

(55:03):
be the souls of the damned as another frequent prey,
or they might be chasing nothing at all, or nothing
that you can even you know, determine. Now, the rules
of these hunts and these hunt encounters seem to vary,
but basically getting in the way of these hunts, or
certainly even being seen by these hunts is potentially dangerous.

(55:23):
You might get swept away into the underworld, and in
some versions of the tradition, trying to interfere with in
the hunt will spell your doom, but in some versions,
aiding the hunt could earn you a reward.

Speaker 2 (55:34):
Ah, I see, So these are kind of ghost riders
in the sky, Like, yeah, you and you come across them,
you best not get in their way, even if they're
not hunting for you.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (55:46):
There's kind of a sense of that in actually, I
would say, in a lot of horror movies, but also
in definitely in Without Warning and in Predator. I know,
there's a lot of sort of academic theory about one
of the common themes of horror being, uh, you know,
the danger of going into liminal spaces that people are
punished for venturing into areas and meddling into affairs that

(56:09):
are not their purview, and so you know, you go
and so in Predator would be there, like these commandos
go into some other country that is not their home,
and they get involved in stuff that is none of
their affair, and thus they become targets of this otherworldly hunt.
I think the same thing is sort of true and
without warning, except it's hokey or I mean, basically the

(56:30):
place they're going is like to some river in some
kind of rural area. But again it's like city kids,
it's the you know, the makeout point. Teens are not
from here, and they go in and they suffer for
invading this liminal space.

Speaker 1 (56:44):
Yeah, I mean, I guess you could even say that
in without warning, you know, they're trying they're trying to
make some point about the distance between the young generation
the older generation, between urban and rural, and so you
could say that there is some exploration of the idea
that it is like another world, but it does.

Speaker 2 (57:03):
They are getting in the way of the hunt, like
the able that's where he's doing his stuff, and they
show up and almost kind of like get into the
middle of it and are punished for it.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
Yeah, like everybody's doing basically okay with it. The drunks
in the bar, they're just maintaining Sergetes addled, but you know,
he's not hurting anybody, and Palettes really wants to hunt
that alien. But you get to see the feeling that
he's just been waiting for the right opportunity to really
bring it to the next level. And that's what the
kids do. They just knock all of the norms out

(57:33):
of out of position, and now we're in a you know,
a much dire situation, right. But with the wild hunts,
like I said, a lot of the time they're hunting
demons and whatnot. But some of these wild hunt traditions
do involve the wild hunters hunting the living. Consider the
Devil's Dandy Dogs of Cornwall, which Carol Rose a focus

(57:55):
story and has written a couple of wonderful encyclopedias that
I continually come back to about monsters and fairies. She
describes the Devil's Dandy Dogs as demonic huntsmen in a
pack of black, fiery eyed demon dogs who quote hunt
down the living and rip them to pieces. And then
they also hunt the souls of the damned. And then
there's also the coon Anin or the hounds of Fairyland

(58:19):
or the Hounds of Hell, also known as the Hounds
of the Mother, or the Corpse Dogs or the sky Dogs.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (58:26):
Yeah, they have a number of different names, and according
to Rose, they're mostly invisible. But when you do see
these dogs, they're stark white and they have red eyes
and red ears, and they're led by either the Devil
or a giant named Bran or a quote monstrous, black faced,
gray clad master huntsmen and known as Gwyn app nude.

(58:48):
And they might be hunting the living, they might be
hunting the souls of the dead. They also might be
hunting unrepentant sinners or unbaptized babies, depending on the telling.

Speaker 2 (58:59):
Is it much sport to hunt unpaptized babies.

Speaker 1 (59:02):
I don't know. I wouldn't think so, unless they're just
really cagy babies. Okay, So yeah, So clearly there is.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
This idea that there are I mean, I think this
is common in beliefs about fairies or about the hidden people,
that they have their own affairs and they're going about
their own business, and that humans often get into trouble
when you sort of wander into the middle of what
they're doing. So are you saying that that's sort of
what's going on here and connects in a way with

(59:31):
Predator and Without Warning.

Speaker 1 (59:34):
Yeah, yeah, I think there is a sense that you know,
you've stumbled upon this otherworldly affair that you don't have
any right to be a part of, but now you're
in it, and you may well face your doom because
of it.

Speaker 2 (59:48):
There is a strange sense of implied justice that is
more there, I would say, in Predator than in Without Warning.
In Predator you recall that, like the Predator does not
say to attack anyone who is unarmed, so in some way,
it is almost a chivalrous alien hunter that it only
wants someone who's a good sport, and you're only good

(01:00:10):
sport for it if you can defend yourself. Yeah, I
feel like that's less the case. And Without Warning I
don't remember anything.

Speaker 1 (01:00:16):
Well, we do have that scene where the monster the
Hunter has no problem taking out the scout master, but
lets an entire pack of boy scouts go free.

Speaker 2 (01:00:26):
That's right, I forgot about that scene. So maybe the
same thing is implied here. I'm coming back to it again,
you screenwriters of Predator, I'm coming for you. I want
to know you. Was this just a variation on without warning.

Speaker 1 (01:00:41):
Yeah, I mean, the Hunter knew that David the Babyface
David Crusoe or David Face Baby Crusoe, whichever it knew
that he was. This is a character worth hunting to
the death right. But the boy Scouts got to let
him go, let him, let him grow up a little bit.

Speaker 2 (01:00:55):
Oh yeah, the other two teens who got killed by
the lake weren't They weren't armed, So I don't know
how holds up. Well, yeah, so maybe the boy Scouts
are let go just because they're too young. Maybe that's it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:05):
The flesh isn't tasty yet. I don't know, right, Maybe
the sucker of frisbees don't actually attach the younglings. We
don't know, or maybe they'd all been baptized. We don't
know the full religious history of everybody in this film.

Speaker 2 (01:01:19):
Oh that's true. We never get any glimpse at the
religion of the Hunter, though you kind of get the
sense that there is at least some narrow bit of
culture implied, because the Hunter is not dressed in what
appears to be utilitarian clothing. The alien Hunter is dressed
in something that looks at least from the earth analogy,
like religious garb. It has robes, and then it has

(01:01:42):
this kind of woven net like or almost Macromay kind
of thing over it.

Speaker 1 (01:01:47):
Yeah, yeah, which I think does also add to the
just weird vibe of the villain here, because yeah, he's
not outfitted like a human hunter. He's not using tools
that are seemingly like anything we use to hunt. He's
like some weird alien priest, flinging flesh frisbees all over
the woods.

Speaker 2 (01:02:06):
Here's a jellyfish Dominus vobiscum. So I wanted to point
out something else that I thought was interesting. That's something
in common with, or something in common between Without Warning
Predator and some ancient myths about divine hunters, which is,
how do you defeat them? If there's like a divine

(01:02:27):
hunter with otherworldly powers and tools at its disposal, is
there any way that immortal or a less powerful entity
can face it down? And the answer appears to be traps.
In this movie, it's Jack Palance with a shed rigged
with dynamite. Remember he gets the explosives in the in

(01:02:47):
the watershed and then they blow the alien to pieces
after he yells alien. And then in Predator it's Schwarzenegger's
tree trunk counterweight, right. Oh yeah, Like he Schwarzenegger sets
up a trap that I think is supposed to originally
hook under the predator's feet and then like throw him
up into a bunch of spikes but or sharpened steaks.

(01:03:11):
But then he has to kind of improvise because the
predator goes around his trap. But then he gets him anyway,
just by dropping a log on him.

Speaker 1 (01:03:18):
He's I think the more ingenious thing that Schwartzenager's character
was a Dutch could have employed. He don't try and
make a really good trap, make a terrible trap, like
a really obviously bad trap that just make the predator
give up and realize, Okay, this guy is not a genius,
not a discord after all. Yeah, I'm just gonna go
ahead and call it a day, which I guess to

(01:03:40):
a certain extent, that's what Sarage is doing in this movie,
because we learned that Sarage is going around digging tiger traps, yes,
deep pit traps, all over the place, to the point
where our heroes just fall.

Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
Into one at some point, but they're fine, there are
fights or anything.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
It's not a very good trap.

Speaker 2 (01:03:54):
Yeah, yeah, but this actually does connect it to a
Greek myth. So there's a Greek mythut the pair of
figures known as the Aloaid, in which Artemis, the divine hunter,
again kills two other divine hunters, two otherwise invincible aggressive
divine hunters, only by resorting to a trap. So here

(01:04:17):
is sort of predator versus predators. Now, the Aloaid were
these twin giants. They were the sons of a human
mother named Ifemidea and of the sea god Poseidon, and
their names were ODIs and e Fialtes. And as demi gods,
ODIs and e Fialtes grew large and violent, and they
lived as these wild, uncontrollable hunters on the land, and

(01:04:41):
they were so powerful that they could only be killed
by each other, and they eventually nurtured designs on Mount Olympus.
They wanted to attack the home of the gods, and
it said that Aris, the god of war, tried to
stop them. He tried to kill them, but they crammed
him into a brazen cauldron. And some versions of the
myth the twin giants wanted to steal away Artemis and

(01:05:04):
Hera from Olympus and make them into their wives. And
in one telling of the myth. The way they're defeated.
I think there's some versions where Apollo kills them, but
in one version, the huntress Artemis is able to catch
them in a trap. She transforms herself into a stag
and then bits the two of them into a hunt
and in animal form, Artemis positions herself between the two

(01:05:28):
giants and they each throw their hunting spears at her,
and then she dodges, and the spears thrown by each
hunter pierced the other, and thus the Demi gods are slain.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
You know what that reminds me of? It also reminds
me of RoboCop three. Isn't that how RoboCop defeats the
two cyber ninjas? Oh?

Speaker 4 (01:05:46):
Is it?

Speaker 1 (01:05:46):
Kind of? I don't recall it, Like basically, he somehow
tricks or so some shenanigans occur that cause the two
cyber ninjas to destroy each other with their swords.

Speaker 2 (01:05:58):
That's interesting And as a connections, I was reading on
IMDb the young actor who played Scaramuci van Deen in
this movie. He apparently did stunts in RoboCop three, if
his IMDb page is correct. But anyway, is this a coincidence?
Why are traps the obvious answer to an overpowered celestial

(01:06:20):
hunter from the sky.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Well, I mean, one part of it could just be to,
you know, to think back on how we would have
dealt with larger predators of old. You know, we had
to figure out ways to outsmart them, and that may
involve either setting a trap, like an actual physical trap
like a pit or a tiger pit. Oh, or it
might involve some sort of yeah we have buffalo jumps,

(01:06:43):
you have some sort of ambush tactics would be employed,
like some way of outsmarting them and using either a
physical artifice or a strategic artifice against them.

Speaker 2 (01:06:53):
Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, so when a human is hunted,
it's obviously it's some kind of inversion of how things
are supposed to be. It's a perversion of the divine order.
We're supposed to hunt, not be hunted. And I wonder
if there's an idea that, in order to reclaim your
humanity and your position atop the chain of being, that
you have to insist on victory by outsmarting this usurping

(01:07:17):
hunter figure rather than simply overpowering it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Yeah. I think that might well be the mythic energy
that without warning is tapping into all right, Well, we're
reaching the end of our discussion here at this point.
If you have not seen the film, you might be wondering, Hey,
where can I watch without Warning? Well, as of this recording,
I don't believe it's available on any of the major

(01:07:41):
streaming sites, at least in the United States. I couldn't,
but it's always worth checking around. Especially I find Amazon
Prime to be a great place to find just righteous trash.
They have just a wonderful selection of obscure titles.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
Yeah, recently they've expanded their Jallo collection and in eye
popping ways, we watched a movie with Baby Jing Carlo
Janini in it, The Black Belly of the Tarantula. Have
you seen that one?

Speaker 1 (01:08:09):
Oh? I haven't seen that one, but I love that title.

Speaker 2 (01:08:10):
Oh man, is it is? It is a Jallo lover's Jallo.

Speaker 1 (01:08:14):
Now, as we mentioned earlier, Shout Factory Scream Factory in
Print put out an awesome DVD and blu ray of
Without Warning back in twenty fourteen. I think it is
out of print. Maybe it'll go back in print by
the time you're listening to this, but that's well worth
finding a copy of. That is the edition that we
both watched in preparation for this episode. Yeah, and hey,

(01:08:37):
if you happen to live in Atlanta, you can totally
rent it at video drone in either format.

Speaker 2 (01:08:42):
I would highly recommend it. I would say it's like
all of the Dean Cundi movies. Once again, it might
be trash, but it's surprisingly watchable.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
All Right, we're going to go and close out the
episode here, but we want to hear from you. What
did you think of the film? Did you happen to
see it back in nineteen eighty. I'm always interested in
those accounts, like, Yeah, I saw it on the screen
in the time that it was speaking to all of
the time it was speaking too.

Speaker 2 (01:09:07):
Did you happen to make it in nineteen eighty? Are
you great?

Speaker 1 (01:09:09):
Yeah? Were you involved in the in the film? Yeah?
Are you great? On Clark? Are you the ghost of
Jack Palance writing into us to let us know that
you did defeat that alien? It was definitely dead and
your character survived for the sequel that we never got
to see. We want to know about that as well.
Hunter of Core, all right, you know how to get
in touch with us, and in the meantime, just wherever

(01:09:31):
you get this podcast, we asked you rate, review, and subscribe.

Speaker 2 (01:09:34):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Seth
Nicholas Johnson. If you'd like to get in touch with us,
we don't know how you would do that yet, but
maybe there will be a way.

Speaker 3 (01:09:51):
Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite show.

Speaker 5 (01:10:00):
AST