Targets (1968)

Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Did you people see the same film I saw?

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Peter Bogdanovich scored his first critical success with Targets that starred an elderly Boris Karloff playing an elderly star of Gothic horror films hardly a stretch for the man's talents. In fact a whole lot like William Henry Pratt in real life. Karloff is telling the producer of his next film that this is it, despite verbal commitments he wants to retire. He's not reaching the newer generation he fears and his films are called camp. Time to just quit.Peter Bogdanovich who also plays the writer of that project that he's turning his back on urges Karloff to reconsider as does Nancy Hsueh Karloff's girl Friday and Bogdanovich's girl friend. He does however have a personal appearance at a drive-in showing one of his films.But while Karloff is musing about retiring, a very disturbed young man has built himself quite an arsenal. One fine day Tim O'Kelly a veteran of Vietnam who has built himself quite an arsenal decides just matter of factly to go on a human shooting spree. He kills his wife and then mows down a few more on the Freeway and then sets himself up at the drive-in to await the night's events.O'Kelly is a frightening young man and this film sadly set a trend for making Vietnam veterans psychotic villains on screen. It lasted for over a decade. No doubt O'Kelly learned his weapon skill for combat, but lots more veterans came home without going psychotic. In any event O'Kelly's baby face and All American looks are what makes his performance all the more frightening.As for Karloff this was ironically his last film away from the horror genre. When he died the following year he had about four posthumous films awaiting release. Talk about dying with your boots on. In real life the farthest thing from his mind was retiring. The film is set up for the inevitable meeting between the old master of the horror film genre and a purveyor of some true life horror. It's worth the wait to see what happens.

Targets is trying to juxtapose the fictional monsters on screen with the real life, unsuspecting monsters in real life, Karloff sums it up in his final line 'thats who the drivers were afraid off' staring at what seems like an innocent young lad who had just moments before killed dozens of people.I think thats why the film works. Karloff wants to retire because he doesn't think he belongs in the world of cinema anymore, people don't find him scary because the monsters he portrays aren't real. Ironically I think people watch Frankenstein today to escape from the 'real horror' and into a world of ghosts, ghouls and monsters.The film itself is a good for the most part. I find myself wanting to see more of Karloff, because his character is so interesting while the character of Bobby is just a psychopath, who one day has a mental breakdown and goes on a shooting spree. Not that that kind of character cant be interesting but I don't think Bogdanovich cared about how or why the Bobby did what he did, he perhaps wanted to state that this happens and show what the real horror is, maybe trying to show the censors that people see stuff like this on the news everyday and yet they want to censor a film about a giant, green monster.Overall, Targets isn't revolutionary. It is, however, nice to see Boris Karloff having fun in his last role and the film is genuinely tense and quite horrifying in how authentic its depictions of violence can be.

"The sick individual finds himself at home with all other similarly sick individuals. The whole culture is geared to this kind of pathology. The result is that the average individual does not experience the separateness the fully schizophrenic person feels. He feels at ease among those who suffer from the same deformation; in fact, it is the fully sane person who feels isolated in the insane society — and he may suffer so much from the incapacity to communicate that it is he who may become psychotic. The crucial question is whether a quasi-autistic or low-grade schizophrenic disturbance helps us to explain the violence spreading today." - Erich Fromm In 1965, teenager Michael Clark positioned himself upon a hilltop overlooking Highway 101, south of Orcutt, California. Using a Mauser rifle equipped with telescopic sight he fired upon passing cars, killing three individuals and wounding six. Clark committed suicide when police rushed his hill. A year later Malcom X was assassinated.In 1966, Former US Marine Charles Whitman embarked on a shooting rampage at a university campus in Texas. He killed 16 people and injured 32. Whitman killed his victims from a university tower observation deck. Earlier that day he murdered his wife and mother at home. Two years later, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy were assassinated.Today, Roger Corman is well known for producing and directing a string of low budget B-movies and exploitation films. "Targets" is one of his most interesting. Seeking to exploit the string of assassinations and shooting rampages that were rocketing across 1960s America, Corman gathered together thirty thousand dollars, latched upon the vague idea of a film based on the life and killings of Charles Whitman, and hired a young Peter Bogdanovich to direct the film. "Targets" was Bogdanovich's debut. He was hired because Corman could pay him virtually nothing. Bogdanovich would go on to make a number of critically praised films, but few are as interesting as this nauseating little horror movie.Bogdanovich would write the film's screenplay with the help of director Sam Fuller, both artists elevating the film beyond your usual Roger Corman fare. Bizarrely, Corman stipulated that "Targets" include footage from "The Terror", a horror movie he had made years earlier. As ageing horror movie legend Boris Karloff, renowned for his roles in early silent and sound horror movies ("The Mummy", "The Body Snatcher", many iconic, early "Franenstein" movies and many Universal Studios horror flicks), owed Corman two days worth of acting, Corman also stipulated that Karloff be written into the film. Bogdanovich obliged.The end result is a film with two narrative strands. On one hand we follow Karloff's character, who plays an ageing horror actor struggling to find modern roles (an obvious allusion to Karloff and his own career), whilst on the other hand we follow a character called Bobby Thompson, a retired Vietnam veteran who seems like an upstanding, all American boy, until he embarks on a murder spree. Both narrative strands don't intersect until the film's climax.Much of the film watches from afar as Bobby does mundane daily activities - talking to his parents, girlfriend, co-workers, shopping, watching TV, sleeping etc – the film conveying a kind of depressingly hollow post-war America, in which cement, strip malls, drive-ins and junk food are the equivalent of culture, and in which everyone is atomised, automatised and drearily locked into their own private cubicles. The film's horror is apparent even before Bobby begins his killings, Bogdanovich latching on to a kind of banal, sunbaked, urban hell (the complete opposite to the romantic, moody, noirish urbana of "Taxi Drivr"); highways ceaselessly spinning cars like conveyor belts, gaudy post war architecture, antiseptic suburban homes, the giant, bland cisterns of oil refineries, the tacky warble of TV and radio. The film's aesthetic sickens. And then the killings begins.Bobby's murders are shot with a similar tone of ambivalence or detachment, Bogdanovich forcing us to watch as Bobby matter-of-factly shoots his parents and lover and then perches himself above a highway. Here he emotionlessly snipes the drivers and passengers of passing cars. No overt attempt is made to psychoanalyse or investigate Bobby's motivations. The film's tone is simply one of nauseating indifference. Unlike most horror/slasher/exploitation films, "Targets" never feels like its been designed to tantalise. Of course salacious plots and exploitative hooks were always Corman's chief aims, but Fuller and Bogdanovich short circuit their producer. How successful they are is arguable.The film ends with Bobby and Karloff meeting, fittingly, in a cinema. It is here where old-horror collides with new, the ancient, classic, black-and-white horror movie star of yesteryear facing up to and superseded by a new, nihilistic generation. Karloff's character hearkens back to Bela Lugosi, Universal and Hammer Horror classics. Bobby's Hitchcock's "Psycho", Powell's "Peeping Tom" and the gore, slasher, zombie and exploitation-horror waves that would follow. The film's climax plays like a raging metaphor for the collapse of the Motion Picture Production Code, the death of Old Hollywood, the stupidity of lax gun control laws, the disintegration of the nuclear family, the real results of post war economic expansion, the impossibility of the American ideal, and the festering rot behind both modern society and audiences, who demand blood as compensation for their own lives. It may be a cheap, trashy film, but Bogdanovich's tone homes in on a kind of wide-spread, societal dysfunction.7.9/10 – Worth one viewing.

Coming at the tail end of the sixties, when the American dream ideal was hugely doubted, Peter Bogdanovich's debut film is pretty much like no other around at that time. It tells the dual stories of two individuals and how fate and circumstance bring them together.Boris Karloff plays aged Bryan Orlok, in a role that mirrors his own personal life, as he decides to quit the movie business due to his own increasing apathy with the changing world around him. At the same time Bobby Thompson, a young man who is paranoid and disconnected from society, goes over the edge and decides to make his mark by killing.The style and tone of the film makes this a refreshing and alternative take on how people interact, with more than its fair share of social commentaries. Filmed with a slow, methodical approach, and bereft of soundtrack, its cold objective view of the two lead characters, especially with the killer, makes for unsettling viewing. The acting is also top notch and if you were ever in doubt of the talents of Karloff then this will surely convince. He effortlessly handles the often lengthy takes with great skill and at one point recounts a scary tale that will please his fans. The scene near the end where Karloff turns and marches towards the assailant is outstanding.Echoing the real life killings carried out by Charles Whitman two years previous which shook America, this is a short sharp shock into a particular heart of darkness.