(1968)
4
Mark Deming
Targets was not Boris Karloff's last film (he would limp through five forgettable horror films before his death, four of them shot in Mexico within a month), but it was a perfect grace note for the actor who starred in several of the most enduring horror classics of the 1930s. As Byron Orlok, a thinly disguised version of himself, Karloff plays a man who feels that in the late 1960's the real horror is to be found not in a movie theater but on the streets of any American city. Orlok is convinced that his time has come and gone, and he wants nothing more than to get out of the movie business. While this resignation contrasts with Karloff's own career, in which he kept working with grim determination right up until his death, he was fortunate that Roger Corman entrusted the project to Peter Bogdanovich, an enthusiastic film historian making his (credited) debut as a director. Bogdanovich gives the story's sniper subplot a cool, semi-documentary feel that makes the terror of the onslaught all the more powerful for never being played as melodrama. In Targets, stage blood spills in gothic mansions ruled by sinister madmen on movie screens, but real blood is shed in the homes, highways, and drive-in movie theaters of Los Angeles. With this film, Bogdanovich and Karloff bridged the gap between classic and contemporary horror, and the result gave them, respectively, the first and final screen triumphs of their careers. Bogdanovich would go on to make a string of major movies in the early 1970s, all of them in some way nostalgia pieces, including The Last Picture Show (1971), What's Up, Doc? (1972), and Paper Moon (1973).
releases for Targets on AllMovie
Targets (1968)
|
Title/Studio |
Release Date |
|
Targets
Paramount Home Entertainment
More
|
April 5, 2004 |
|
Targets
Paramount
More
|
August 12, 2003 |
