Director: Arnold Laven
Cast: Adam Williams, Meg Randall, Ed Binns, Harlan Warde
Have I Seen It Before: Never. Up until a few minutes before it started, I hadn’t even known it exited. Apparently, it had been thought lost up until about twenty years ago.
Did I Like It: Yeah, you know? I did. The film is slight, it’s cheaply made, but there’s never a moment where the film doesn’t know what it is doing. That would usually be more than enough to say, “Sure, if Without Warning! comes across your radar, give it a look.”
But there’s more than a few things here to recommend it beyond those basic requirements. First, its use of a semi-documentary format only occasionally distracts with an overreliance on voice over narration. Other films of the era would be content for the controlled antiseptic quality of a soundstage, but here the killers and the cops enter the real world of the time. Verisimilitude may be cheap sometimes, but it’s worth its weight in gold.
Second, the film is far funnier—without completely descending into parody—than I might have given credit to it on spec, as a lurid crime b-picture. Detectives and police support staff—between using crime lab equipment to make coffee and trying to find new and interesting ways to strangle a mannequin—have a certain manic delight in their jobs. Were this same creative team to produce a crime procedural today, it might have really been something to see.
Third, branching out from what one might think of as the noir genre, the film is more content to embrace what would become the slasher genre. Between smoky bars and dames who know all the angles, there’s a pinch of criminal pathology thrown into the mix. This isn’t the story of someone who drifted into violence as a means of dealing with the immediate situation in front of him. This is ugly violence for the sake of it, which admittedly can be more than a little bit fun.