"My kind of horror isn't horror anymore." So says Boris Karloff in Peter Bogdanovich's Targets. This statement holds as much truth today as it did back in 1968: how can "painted monsters", as Karloff puts it, stand up against mass-murdering snipers, or car bombs? Targets follows to separate story lines. Byron Orlok (Karloff) is an ageing and disillusioned horror film star preparing to retire. Bobby Thompson (Tom O'Kelly) is a Vietnam veteran who takes to sniping drivers from a water tower. Both stories eventually converge at a drive-in movie, where Orlok is making his final public appearance and Thomspon goes to escape the police.
Karloff is more than convincing as an embittered English gent, but it is O'Kelly that forms the film's core. The scene atop a water tower, bearing obvious similarities to Charles Whitman's shooting of 14 people from the University of Texas' administrative building just two years early, is genuinely riveting cinema. Shot entirely without dialogue, Bogdanovich gives us an idea of how insignificant O'Kelly considers his victims by filming them in long shot. It is only during the film's climax at the drive-in that the camera joins them in their terror.
Forty years on, Targets, Peter Bogdanovich's debut feature, has lost none of its power to unnerve. And its central theme is more relevant today than ever. The likes of the Saw series, and the influx of Asian horror, seem completely arbitrary when real terror (or so we're told) can strike at any moment.
Karloff is more than convincing as an embittered English gent, but it is O'Kelly that forms the film's core. The scene atop a water tower, bearing obvious similarities to Charles Whitman's shooting of 14 people from the University of Texas' administrative building just two years early, is genuinely riveting cinema. Shot entirely without dialogue, Bogdanovich gives us an idea of how insignificant O'Kelly considers his victims by filming them in long shot. It is only during the film's climax at the drive-in that the camera joins them in their terror.
Forty years on, Targets, Peter Bogdanovich's debut feature, has lost none of its power to unnerve. And its central theme is more relevant today than ever. The likes of the Saw series, and the influx of Asian horror, seem completely arbitrary when real terror (or so we're told) can strike at any moment.