December 13 2025, 14:42
Warning Sign
Director: Hal Barwood
Release year: 1985
At a remote agricultural biochemical facility, a group of scientists are celebrating a discovery, but while taking a photograph a vial is accidentally broken and the whole building is immediately shut down. Government forces arrive to manage the incident, confusing the people of the town who don’t know the facility’s true purpose. Sheriff Cal Morse knows his wife is trapped inside and decides he has to try to get her out.
It moves quickly, and the first half is a particularly intriguing blend of The Andromeda Strain, The Crazies, and more cheesy TV movies of the time. This makes it extremely watchable. The cast is decent, and Yaphet Kotto as Major Connolly is charismatic and brings some edge to things, but towards the end it gets flabby plot-wise and too melodramatic for my taste. I was never bored though.
The story is about the risks governments take without informing the public, in this period specifically genetically modified foods and the biological weapons race in the later stages of the Cold War. I’m always fascinated by how genre films like this got made. First-time (and only-time) director Hal Barwood was a writer-for-hire, and he wrote the script for Warning Signs with long-time writing partner Matthew Robbins as a manageable project for Barwood to try his hand at directing a film himself.
It feels remarkably accomplished, even though it bombed at the box office, because he had Academy Award-winning professionals all around him, including Spartacus editor Robert Lawrence, Dean Cundey as cinematographer, and Henry Bumstead as production designer, who later worked on Cape Fear, Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby.
I suspect the producer, Jim Bloom, played a major role in how this film came together (he's the second of the three interviews in this three-hour video!).
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