1980 Week: Without Warning

Schlockmeister Greydon Clark strikes again with this dull alien-invasion picture, which was made so cheaply that only one alien is featured. The picture mostly comprises interminable scenes of teenagers running from danger, so Without Warning is more akin to the slasher movies of the late ’70s and early ’80s than to other space-monster movies of the same period. It’s worth nothing that cinematographer Dean Cundey also shot Halloween (1978), because Clark apes that picture’s style quite shamelessly with heavy shadows and long Steadicam shots. In the opening sequence, a hunter and his son get killed by flying discs that look like fried eggs with tentacles growing out of them, so viewers learn quickly not to expect much. Later, two young couples hop into a van and head for the woods, encountering the requisite creepy old people on the way there. Word to the wise: When the proprietor of a general store filled with taxidermy says don’t go in the woods, maybe don’t go in the woods. Anyway, the flying egg things kill two of the teenagers, forcing survivors Greg (Christopher T. Nelson) and Sandy (Tarah Nutter) to seek help from the aforementioned creepy old people. The gas-station guy (Jack Palance) offers assistance, but a crazed ex-soldier (Martin Landau) makes things worse by slipping into a Vietnam flashback. Landau and Palance enliven their scenes, but the most enjoyable bits of Without Warning are unintentionally funny, as when Greg and Sandy defeat a horrific outer-space monster that’s attacking their car—by knocking it off the car with their windshield wipers. Consider yourselves warned about Without Warning.

Without Warning: LAME

Black Gunn (1972)

          Despite tasty dialogue and a virile performance by leading man Jim Brown, the blaxploitation actioner Black Gunn is never more than mediocre. The plot introduces a number of exciting elements that should create friction, such as a war between a black-power activist group and Italian mobsters, but cowriter/director Robert Hatford-Davis focuses too heavily on dialogue, relegating action scenes to the periphery of the movie. Further, Hartford-Davis and his collaborators can’t figure out how to utilize important characters—so, for instance, costar Martin Landau barely appears in the film even though he’s ostensibly the main villain, hence his second billing after Brown. All in all, the movie is watchable, but just barely. Set in Los Angeles, Black Gunn kicks off with an armed robbery at a secret mob office. Invaders steal cash and incriminating ledgers. The robbery was executed by soldiers of the Black Action Group (BAG), one of whom is a young man named Scott (Herbert Jefferson Jr.), and Scott asks his older brother, nightclub proprietor Gunn (Brown), to stash the ledgers. Soon afterward, Gunn finds himself caught in the middle of the aforementioned war. Also thrown into the mix are policemen who are investigating BAG’s activities and trying to take down the mob.

          All of this should play out smoothly, providing a steady stream of chases and fights and shootouts, but Hartford-Davis lets the film go slack during long interludes of quasi-casual conversation. On the plus side, some of the dialogue is hip and snide, with Brown and costar Bernie Casey—who plays a BAG operative—coming off especially well whenever they spew insults and threats. (Leading lady Brenda Sykes is wasted as badly as Landau, while Bruce Glover—who plays a sadistic mob enforcer—has some amusingly over-the-top moments even though his characterization is largely pedestrian.) It’s worth noting that as blaxploitation movies go, Black Gunn is restrained in the area of presenting African-American stereotypes, since most of the black characters in the movie seem resourceful and tough. The problem, of course, is that restraint is not the quality viewers generally seek from blaxploitation movies. So by the time Black Gunn busts out the heavy artillery for a perfunctory shoot-’em-up finale, it’s very much a case of too little, too late.

Black Gunn: FUNKY

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! (1970) & The Organization (1971)

          Seeing as how the Oscar-nominated thriller In the Heat of the Night (1967) is best remembered today for its bold portrayal of race relations—when a racist white character slaps a black detective, the black detective shocks onlookers by slapping the racist back—it’s peculiar that both sequels to In the Heat of the Night are so tame by comparison. Although these follow-up films superficially delve into racial politics, they’re primarily action-packed police procedurals. In fact, it’s hard to think of another movie series in which latter titles bear so little stylistic and thematic resemblance to the original picture. Even the home base of the series’ hero changed from the first movie to the second: When audiences first encountered Detective Virgil Tibbs (Sidney Poitier), he operated out of Philadelphia, yet in They Call Me MISTER Tibbs! and The Organization, he’s a member of the San Francisco Police Department.

          Moreover, while the original film is an intelligent drama with sophisticated camerawork and music, Tibbs is basically a blaxploitation picture, with its gritty urban setting and percolating score. The Organization tacks in yet another direction, presenting a straightforward cop story. If not for the continuity of Poitier appearing in all three movies, it would be hard to recognize any tether between them.

          Of the sequels, Tibbs is moderately better simply because it offers a sensationalistic stew of sleazy storylines. (Say that three times fast!) Tibbs is assigned to find out who killed a prostitute, but he’s conflicted because the prime suspect is his pal, Logan Thorpe (Martin Landau), an activist priest working for liberal causes that Tibbs supports. The effective supporting cast includes the always-entertaining Anthony Zerbe as a violent pimp, plus TV favorites Ed Asner (Lou Grant) and Garry Walberg (Quincy, M.E.). Moreover, the picture introduces the recurring characters of Tibbs’ wife (Barbara McNair) and children, who were absent from the first picture; while grounding the detective in everyday reality, the normalcy of these characters also drains some of Tibbs’ mythic qualities. It doesn’t help that the script, credited to Alan Trustman and James R. Webb, twists awkwardly toward an overheated finale. Tibbs isn’t bad, as disposable police thrillers go, but it’s hardly a worthy extension of In the Heat of the Night.

          The next picture, written by Webb and John Ball, the author of the original novel In the Heat of the Night and therefore the creator of the Tibbs character, goes lighter on the skeeviness while drifting into the bland mainstream of everyday cop pictures. The convoluted narrative of The Organization involves Tibbs investigating a company that’s fronting for a drug operation, and there’s a bit too much screen time devoted to Tibbs’ home life, accentuating the undercooked nature of the main storyline. Plus, the more filmmakers pulled Tibbs away from racially charged milieus, the more it became apparent that Tibbs wasn’t a particularly strong character. The novelty of his first appearance, and to a lesser degree his second, was defined by his clash with racist power structures. Stripped of this powerful opposing force, Tibbs is just another onscreen tough guy with a badge.

          As such, it’s not surprising the franchise went fallow after these two diverting but forgettable pictures; although Ball continued writing novels and short stories about Tibbs well into the ’80s, the character didn’t reappear onscreen until 1988, when In the Heat of the Night was adapted into a moderately successful TV series. Troubled actor Howard Rollins played Tibbs until Rollins was fired from the show in 1993, and the series continued for two more years without the character.

They Call Me MISTER Tibbs!: FUNKY

The Organization: FUNKY

Meteor (1979)

          The disaster genre was fading by the time this star-studded flick arrived in late 1979, but it’s not as if Meteor ever stood a chance of success. Possibly the lowest-energy disaster movie ever made, this silly picture comprises bored-looking actors lounging around a high-tech command center while they wait for something bad to happen. Considering that the storyline envisions a giant asteroid thundering toward Earth, it’s amazing how casual everyone behaves. Even during the second half of the movie, after thousands of people have died, characters idly pass their time by chatting over chess games and flirting over salads.

          Sean Connery stars as Paul Bradley, a protagonist pulled straight off the disaster-movie assembly line: He’s a reluctant savior whose expertise concerns an outer-space missile installation the U.S. government hopes to use against the approaching meteor. Paul is assumed into service by government official Harry Sherwood (Karl Malden), and they quarrel about strategy with the inevitable hard-ass military man, General Adlon (Martin Landau). Adlon is among the most idiotic characters in the history of the disaster genre, because he spends most of the movie bitching about the danger of leaving America undefended even though the alternative is planetary obliteration.

          The story also features Cold War-era hogwash about persuading the Russian government to use the missiles on their outer-space installation, so Bradley’s Soviet counterpart, Dr. Dubov (Brian Keith), travels to the U.S. with his assistant/translator, Tatiana (Natalie Wood). Keith’s gruff vibe enlivens the movie, but Meteor is so drab the filmmakers forget to advance the predictable Connery-Wood romance beyond a few friendly conversations.

          Even with Poseidon Adventure director Ronald Neame helming, Meteor drags along through one uneventful scene after another before the corpse-strewn climax, in which a small meteor hits the command center, forcing the heroes to make a daring escape attempt through an underwater subway tunnel. Enervated in the extreme, Meteor wastes a great cast (which also includes Richard Dysart, Henry Fonda, and Trevor Howard), and since the movie came out two years after Star Wars, its inert special effects feel positively archaic.

Meteor: LAME

A Town Called Hell (1971)

Yet another unwatchable Western spat forth from the bowels of the low-budget European film industry, A Town Called Hell is one of those simultaneously moronic and pretentious morality tales filled with dialogue about vengeance, and imagery rife with religious significance, yet almost completely lacking in coherence. The confusing picture begins when two Mexican revolutionaries—played by Robert Shaw and Martin Landau, to give you a sense of how far the picture is removed from reality—storm into a town and slaughter the local church congregation. A decade later, for reasons that are never particularly clear, Shaw has become the pacifistic local priest, and Telly Savalas—groomed within an inch of his life and talking in a vaguely Noo Yawk diction that makes no sense for the context—has emerged as a brutal local warlord whose power apparently stems from his willingness to shoot anyone who crosses his path. Into this environment arrives a mysterious black carriage containing a glass coffin, in which rests a white woman (Stella Stevens) who is very much alive; it seems her husband was killed in the town at some point, and she’s come for revenge. Yet her revenge, for some reason, takes the form of hiding out in Shaw’s church while Savalas taunts her with threats of violence. Then, when Savalas’ men abruptly turn on him, he more or less disappears from the story to make room for Landau, now a military official, who wants to find a fugitive hidden somewhere in the town. None of this makes much sense, and none of it is interesting; it’s all just very sweaty and unpleasant. Shaw, a great actor when guided by a strong director, is awful here, glowering and screaming pointlessly, and Stevens is so lifeless it’s appropriate she makes her entrance in a coffin. Savalas postures to a silly extreme, strutting around shirtless for most of the picture, and only Landau tries to give a credible performance, though he’s handicapped by the incomprehensible storyline.

A Town Called Hell: SQUARE