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| Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
The debut film of writer-producer-director Peter Bogdanovich
Targets who would eventually go on to make the searing small-town
American drama The Last Picture Show is a forgotten masterful
intersection between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood as a wholly original American
thriller whose real-life horrors involving political assassinations echoing the
film’s events effectively kept most moviegoers from attending. The brainchild of Roger Corman who told
director Bogdanovich he could make any film he wanted provided he use Boris
Karloff and footage from the 1963 Corman-Karloff collaboration The Terror
in the finished product, Targets begins on a note of high camp before segueing
into real world tragedies involving gun violence and a beleaguered aging
horror-movie star. Though overlooked at
the time, the film and its realisateur are both highly regarded now with the
film being seen as one of Karloff’s greatest performances in a New Hollywood era
of scrappier director-driven storytelling.
Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) is at the end of his rope,
believing himself to be obsolete and past his prime despite Hollywood producers’
pleas for him to continue starring in B-horror flicks. Abruptly quitting midway through post-production
on a new dark castle driven horror movie and announcing his retirement, the cantankerous
and worn-out cinema icon is hastily coaxed by young hotshot filmmaker Sammy
Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) to do one last in-person appearance at a local
drive-in theater. Meanwhile, enter Bobby
Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) who is a well dressed and groomed young man working as
an insurance agent living with his wife and parents in the San Fernando Valley. On the side however, he’s a gun nut who grows
increasingly disturbed and sociopathic. Unprovoked one morning after his
father goes to work he begins a killing spree starting with his wife, mother
and a grocery courier. After fleeing the
scene and picking off some more targets at an oil refinery, he hides within the
very drive-in movie theater screen our titular horror icon is set to appear at,
setting the stage for a most unexpected collision of cinema from the past
violently crashing against the present.
A brilliant, scathing and chilling portrait of the gulf
between entertainment and responsibility, performance and sociopathy with icons
of the past locking horns with fresh young blood, Targets begins slyly
as an investigation of the so-called has-been and drifting into an eternal Hellscape
of B-movie camp before segueing into a study of a disturbed man slowly
careening towards indiscriminate violence against anyone everyone in search of
some sense of insane purpose. Shot with sterile
precision by the great Hungarian cinematographer László Kovács of Easy Rider
and Five Easy Pieces, the music-free microbudget New Hollywood lean
mean indie cements what would become the first of many collaborations between Kovács
and Bogdanovich. Tim O’Kelly is good at
playing an unhinged Golden Boy, so to speak while Bogdanovich himself turns
over a good performance as an exasperated filmmaker trying to get the last out
of Byron Orlok that he can. Boris
Karloff, it goes without saying, gives one of his strongest and most iconic
performances in an era that seems to have moved on without him and even at his
age and apparent poor health at the time still manages to intimidate with his
cold dark gaze.
Produced on a microbudget of around $130,000 and picked up
by Paramount Pictures who delayed the film’s release from 1967 to 1968
following the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy
which gave the film some topical relevance and apprehension among cinephiles, Targets
tragically came and went without much business or attention. However, that didn’t stop it from becoming a
critical darling out of the gate with a measure of praise heaped upon Karloff’s
career-spanning performance and helped secure Bogdanovich a successful
directing career going on to make three strong studio features going
forward. Looking back on it years later
in an age where violence in the media and the nature of copycat crimes are intertwined
and the spectrum between the spectator and the character onscreen, the film
couldn’t be more prescient or timeless if it tried. As a genre thriller it is very nerve wracking
but what it says about the balance between the real world and the box of magic
being opened across a movie screen has far more deeply disturbing implications
in effectively director Bogdanovich’s first true masterwork.
--Andrew Kotwicki
