Targets

Plot synopsis:
A movie clip from the film 'The Terror' is shown (the climatic flooding scene at the end featuring actors Boris Karloff, Dick Miller, Jack Nicholson, etc.). The clip ends with the final fade out and it is being shown in a small screening room somewhere in Hollywood. The elderly star of the film, Byron Orlock (Boris Karloff), tells the producer Marshall Smith (Monty Landis) that he has decided to retire from acting because he considers his performance no longer frightening in mainstream society. Marshall and the film's director Sammy Michaels (director Peter Bogdanovich) try to convince him to appear in their next film, but Orlok refuses and plans to return to his native England to live out the rest of his days, and refuses to even read the new script that Sammy gives to him. Orlok walks out with his young secretary Jenny (Nancy Hsueh), whom is Sammy's current girlfriend. Sammy follows him outside to persuade him to stay in Hollywood, but Orlok tells Sammy that he considers himself to be an anachronism because people are no longer frightened by horror pictures. "The world belongs to the young. Let them have it", says Orlock.Across the street, a young man named Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly) is seen buying a high-powered semi-automatic .303 caliber hunting rifle and pays with it by check. He goes out to the parking lot to his white convertible and places the newly purchased rifle in his car truck which has more then a dozen firearms of various calibers. Bobby drives along a freeway listening to the car radio and munching on Baby Ruth candy bars. He arrives home in a suburb of the San Fernando Valley where he lives with his wife Ilene (Tanya Morgan) and his parents and has dinner with them.Across town, Orlok is dining with Jenny at a local restaurant when his manager Ed Laughlin (Arthur Peterson) arrives and tries to persuade him to stay in town at least for a few days to attend the premier of 'The Terror' at a local Racine drive-in theater the following evening. But Orlok refuses and even refuses to speak to Marshall over a phone that Ed tries to set up.After dinner, Bobby and his father go out to a shooting range where they shoot at tin can targets. Bobby has a keen talent from shooting guns apparently due to his recent military service. Since Bobby still lives with his parents, its convenient for him and his father, Robert Thompson Sr., to go out shooting together. While his father is setting up more tin targets, Bobby, for some odd reason points his rifle at his father seemingly intent on shooting him. Robert Thompson sees Bobby aiming the rifle at him and orders him to put the rifle down, because pointing a gun a people goes against everything he has taught his son.That evening, Orlok is in his hotel suite with Jenny who is setting up his schedule for his return to England the following day. Jenny also tries to persuade Orlok to stay at least for the premier of his latest film, but Orlok tells her that he is through with the movie business and still refuses to read Sammy's script. Orlok then sends her home while he stays alone in his room to watch TV.At the Thompson house that evening, the whole family is watching TV together when Ilene says that she has to go to her night job as a switchboard operator. Bobby follows her to the bedroom and wants to talk to her saying that he has not been feeling well lately and has been getting "funny ideas". But since she is late for her job, she tells him that she doesn't have time to talk and leaves. He asks her not to take his car but take her mother's to work and she agrees. After Ilene leaves and his parents go to bed for the night, Bobby goes to his car and takes out one of his guns, a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol before returning to the house.At Orlok's hotel room, he orders room service and watches himself on one of his old movies 'The Criminal Code' that is playing as a late-night movie. Sammy arrives and demands that Orlok hand over his script and they both watch the movie together. Over drinks, Sammy again tries to convince Orlok to appear in his latest film because the script that he wrote will cast Orlok as a real-life person rather then a bogeyman. But the bitter Orlok announces that he is still fed up with the film business and shows Sammy that people are more frighted by the latest newspaper headings about crimes committed by random people then horror films. Sammy gets so drunk that he attempts to leave, but collapses and Orlok puts him in his own bed and soon afterwords also collapses drunk next to Sammy.Meanwhile at the Thompson house, Bobby is sitting alone in his bedroom chain smoking when Ilene returns home. His tone of voice is now very cold and he asks her not to turn on the lights because he has a headache. When she asks him what he wanted to talk to her about and why he is perplexed, he no longer wants to talk and asks her to go to bed.The next morning, after his father has apparently left for work, Bobby types out a note and when Ilene walks in the room, he suddenly takes out his .45 caliber gun and violently shoots her dead. When Bobby's mother runs into the room, he shoots her dead too. He then shoots an unfortunate grocery delivery man who enters the house. Bobby hides the bodies in rooms through the house, hides the bloodstains and leaves, leaving behind a note saying that he has killed his wife and mother and will continue killing until he is caught or killed.In Orlok's hotel suite, a hung-over Sammy wakes up and sees a sleeping Orlok next to him and jumps, waking him up. Sammy says that he was having a nightmare and woke up to see Byron Orlok. As Orlok gets up to answer a knock on his front door, he passes a mirror and he too jumps from his own reflection. Jenny has arrived with Orlok's internary with his airline tickets to New York as well as his tickets for the ship to take him back to England. However, Orlok finally agrees to make the final promotional appearance at the Racine Drive-In that evening for the premier of his latest film.Across town, Bobby arrives at another gun store and asks for 300 rounds of ammunition for his new rifle as well as box of 12-gauge buckshot for his double-barreled shotgun. Despite the fact that Bobby looks a little jittery and of the unusually large quantity of ammunition requested, the clerk sells him the ammunition. When the clerk asks Bobby about the order, Bobby tells him that he is going out to "shoot some pigs."In Orlok's hotel suite, he, Jenny, Sammy along with a brash radio disk jockey named Kip Larkin (Sandy Baron) discuss his appearance at the drive-in theater for that night and Orlok decides to reherse to them a ghost story that he plans to tell after the movie premier.Meanwhile, Bobby drives to an industrial center and after parking his car, pulls out of the trunk all of his guns in a large pouch and enters an abandoned amusement park that sits next to an oil storage tank facility where he scales a cynderblock wall and climbs up the stairs of one of the oil tanks that sits alongside a busy freeway. Bobby lays out all of his rifles and pistols that he brought with him as if displaying them for himself and then eats a sandwich and drinks soda pop that he also brought before taking am with his new high-powered rifle at motorists traveling along the road and opens fire, killing and/or wounding many in which some cars veer off the road. An oil company worker investigates the shooting, but Bobby kills him too with a blast from his shotgun as he is reloading. When Bobby hears police sirens and sees police cars approaching on the freeway, he grabs most of his guns and runs down the stairs and back to his car, but drops several of his weapons including his .45 pistol, an unused .44 magnum revolver, as well as his shotgun and a rifle and some boxes of ammunition. As Bobby drives away, a police car appears and give chase, but he eludes it by driving into the very same drive-in theater that is showing Orlok's 'The Terror' for that night. After reloading and having a meal from the concession stand, Bobby carries his remaining guns in his US Army pouch and walks through a door leading to the big screen.When it gets dark and the movie finally goes on, Bobby climbs up the structure and begins to shoot the viewers through a small hole in the screen. He first shoots a man in a telephone booth and then shoots people in their cars, on by one. He even shoots and kills the projectionist. Orlok arrives for his special appearance and the limo parks close to the screen. Meanwhile, many viewers start to leave because they realize that there is a sniper present. A traffic jam ensues. When Bobby pauses to reload, he accidentally knocks over his last few boxes of ammunition. Panicking, Bobby climbs down the screen and tries to retrieve the ammo from a drainage but without success.Some male viewers take guns from the trunks of their cars and charge towards the screen. Seeing the vigilante mob approach, Bobby runs to an area to the side of the screen and opens fire randomly. One of his shots seriously injures Jenny as she gets out of the limo. The police soon arrive as does Sammy and they try to find both Orlok and the sniper. Orlok angrily walks towards the screen as Bobby finally runs out of ammunition for his rifle and opens fire with one of his smaller pistols. He gets confused when he sees the Orlok character on the drive-in screen walking towards him and sees the real Orlok walking to him as well. Bobby first shoots Orlok, but misses and only gazes his forehead with the bullet. Bobby takes aim and shoots at the Orlok on the big screen. Blinded by police searchlights zeroing in on him, Bobby fires widely until he runs out of ammo. When Bobby takes out another one of his pistols, Orlok rushes up and knocks the gun out of Bobby's hand with his walking cane and beats Bobby with it as well as literally slapping him into submission. Bobby then cowers in fear as Orlok says, "Is that what I was afraid of?" Two policemen run up to the screen and arrest Bobby. As he is being led away, Bobby says to his police captors, "I hardly ever missed, did I?" Bobby is taken away in a police car while Sammy tends to Orlok and takes him away in his limo as the crowd of people and cars file out of the drive in theater.The final shot shows the deserted drive in theater the morning after which is now empty, except for Bobby's white car sitting alone in the empty lot as the end credits silently roll.

Tags: cult, suspenseful

Review:
However, things are not as simple as that as, on the same day that Orlock is due to make his final public appearance at the screening of last movie (Roger Corman's 'The Terror'), there's a serial killer on the loose who's taking pot shots at people with a sniper rifle.
and for the right reasons as it contrasts a Monster from the pages of real life, a quite seemingly normal fellow who unexpectedly goes off the deep end and winds up on a killing spree, with an old Horror film icon named Byron Orlock, clearly based on the man who plays him Boris Karloff himself.
Addressing  issues that are more powerful today than when the film was made, Targets is a wildly ambitious take on modern life, a great coda to Karloff's career, and a vital interface between B movies and independent cinema..
Calling a story with much gunfire "quiet" is peculiar, but the sound editing of Verna Fields is the unsung hero of "Targets", where the bursts of lethal noise alternate with a serene soundtrack stripped down to not too much era music (Bogdanovich had a handful of obscure 60's tunes to sparingly use) and, thankfully, none of the din cluttering most 21st century movies, letting us hear the full tones of each person's voice sans cranked up score and effects."Targets" is a terrific and overlooked time capsule from an era before school shootings were an almost weekly event in the news and when there seemed to be a solution for ending violence in our future.
Many, many thanks to writer/director Peter Bogdanovich who – under the protective supervision of Roger Corman – cast Boris Karloff in a role that couldn't have been played by anyone else, except maybe Vincent Price (like Bogdanovich own supportive character even funnily mentions at one point during the film).
Young director Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) has just written a great script especially for Orlock, and tries to persuade him to re-think his retirement plans on the build-up to Orlock's final public appearance at a drive-in for his new movie The Terror.
Meanwhile, suburban husband and gun-obsessive Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly) is planning a massacre using his sniper rifle, starting with his wife and family.As usual when it comes to Roger Corman productions, the story behind the film is just as interesting (often more so) as the film itself.
Karloff apparently owed Corman a couple of days work, so he was handed to Corman protégé Peter Bogdanovich, and told him to make whatever film he liked - as long as it was cheap, quick, included footage of his film The Terror (1963), and drew on the recent Charles Whitman killings.
This is the stuff of nightmares and resonates today, especially with recent developments in D.C.The sub-plot of Boris Karloff's character, the retiring Horror film star Byron Orlock, is somewhat confusing and could be described, by cynics at least, as simply a way in which Bogdanovich gets a 'name' associated with the film.
Bogdanovich (who also appears in a small role) attempts to correlate the stories of two disparate characters: an ex-soldier turned sniper and a retiring horror-movie actor (Boris Karloff) about to make his final publicity appearance at a drive-in movie theater.
In this combined effort, called " Targets ", Director Peter Bagdonovich and writer Polly Platt team with a legend of horror, Boris Karloff who plays Byron Orlok an aging film actor who up and decides to retire from movies.
Story is patterned around real life mass murderer Charles Whitman, who in 1966 murdered 16 people during a shooting rampage at the University of Texas in Austin.Cineaste Peter Bogdanovich's debut directing effort, sadly, to this day remains a topical hot spot.
Over the years it has come to gain a cult following that is much deserved, the low budget production value actually helping to keep it uneasily potent.Story is structured by way of two separate narrative threads, one sees Karloff as veteran horror film actor Byron Orlock, who sees himself as an anachronism and announces his retirement from movie making.
The two stories converging for a bloody finale at a drive in movie theatre, where Orlock is making a special guest appearance, the old time horror of the movies coming face to face with the real terror of the modern world.Though uncredited by choice, the screenplay belongs to Fuller, something that Bogdanovitch has always been keen to point out, and it's with the writing where the film gets its quality factor.
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.
Bull's Eye. Despite working with a tight budget and schedule and having star Karloff for only two days of shooting, Bogdanovich made a smashing directorial debut with this thriller, telling the parallel stories of an aging horror movie star and a sniper.
(As an actor he's passable, but he could direct and edit with the best of them).Karloff plays Byron Orlok, an aging horror film star now reduced to making second-rate horror flicks and thinking that he's no longer needed or even relevant.
The trail of murder comes to a head when both worlds collide in an art-imitates-life (or is it the other way around?) moment at a drive-in theater.The acting is exemplary here with Karloff a standout essentially playing himself and ably supported by Bogdanovich as screenwriter/director Sammy Michaels and Nancy Hsueh as Karloff's loyal assistant and (possible?) love interest of Sammy.Bogdanovich wisely eschews blood as much as possible and builds the tension with long shots and quick cuts at key moments in the movie.
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.
Elderly horror-film star (Boris Karloff) who, while making a personal appearance at a drive-in theater, confronts a psychotic Vietnam veteran (Tim O'Kelly) who has turned into a mass-murdering sniper.This film was written, produced and directed by Peter Bogdanovich under the direction of mentor Roger Corman.
B-movie mogul Roger Corman came to Peter in late 1967 with a proposal: take 40 minutes of footage from Corman's film "The Terror", film 20 minutes of Boris Karloff (who owed Corman 2 days of work), film 40 minutes of other stuff with other actors to tie it all together, and complete a feature film all for a budget of $125,000.You'd think this would be a recipe for a colossal turd of a movie, but on the contrary, it pushed everyone's creativity to the max and resulted in a remarkable work of cinema.Peter & his wife grabbed their typewriters and wrote a modern horror story contrasted against a classic Victorian horror.
Targets (1968) **** (out of 4)The history behind the film is known by just about everyone as Roger Corman owned two more days worth of shooting with Boris Karloff so he told director Bogdanovich to make a movie with these two days as well as footage from THE TERROR.
You'd expect a young director would just turn out another piece of junk but instead Bogdanovich decided to do something different and the end result is one of the best movies of its kind.The story has a veteran horror movie star (Boris Karloff) wanting to retire because in the current times people aren't afraid of fake monsters any more but a young writer (Bogdanovich) tries to talk him into one more picture.
I just bought the DVD after reading some positive reviews and I wasn't disappointed as this is a well paced, quietly disturbing thriller, which although not overly violent, manages to creep under your skin, especially considering it was made in the 60's and has relevance even today when compared with the recent gun killings in America.Without spoiling the storyline, Boris Karloff practically plays himself and the way the two separate story lines converge, leads to a darkly humorous ending.If you enjoy thrillers and want to be kept entertained and gripped, then this movie is worth a look..
Peter Bogdanovich directed Boris Karloff in one of his last films, playing a version of himself: Byron Orlok, a horror film star who believes real-life horrors have made his cinematic kind obsolete; meanwhile, a young gun enthusiast (Tim O'Kelly) goes on a shooting spree which brings him to the drive-in theater where Orlok is to make a personal appearance.
This low-budget Roger Corman-produced thriller sums up his career and is a good film to boot.Bogdanovich plays a young writer-director whose next film seems to be one very much like "Targets." The real "Targets" is rich in self-references and movie buffery.
Sikking's by-the-numbers pipe-smoking marksman for-hire in John Boorman's terrific Point Blank the year before may have been some kind of inspiration for the precision of the character of Bobby Thompson in Targets (along with the real-life Charles Whitman), but the eerie similarities between this cynical profit-taking drive-in deathfest and the chilling, cold-blooded murders currently occurring at absolute random in the United States' mid-Atlantic region are simply spooky, and I'm guessing this will probably attract some new viewers to the film.
This is a film that clearly illustrates what can be done with very little money, if the director and writers are creative enough and lucky enough to get a star of Boris Karloff's magnitude and presence.Karloff only appears here because he owed Roger Corman about three days shooting time on his latest contract; using him in a secondary but crucial role, Bogdanovich gives a true resonance and frisson to the film that might not have been there with a lesser light in the role of the old-time bogeyman who knows that he's not nearly as frightening as the Real World.
One of the cleverer ways he uses to make this point is Orlok's recounting, in that beautiful, deep, velvety, slightly-lisping voice that is so archetypal, of "The Appointment in Samarra", a fable that stresses that however much we attempt to escape our fate, often that much more we bring it to its climax.An important point that Bogdanovich understood, which the makers of "Two Minute Warning", another sniper film, apparently did not, is that the best way to portray true terror of this story is to focus tightly on the killer, leaving his victims -- for the most part (one particularly scarifying sequence in the drive-in at the end that shows us in tight sharp focus the results of his marksmanship serves to emphasise the point) nothing but distant, anonymous ...
Made by Roger Corman's 1960s low-budget film company and directed by Peter Bogdanovich in his debut as a director, the story of how the film came to be is as almost as interesting as the movie itself.
Karloff plays an aging icon of the older style horror films of the less graphic, more spooky variety, which has seemingly been rendered obsolete, and, literally under assault, in the film, and unable to frighten or be possessed of any meaning, when contrasted, as the film does, against the more topical horrors of the day typified by a Charles Whitman type, Vietnam vet, who snaps, and turns his sniper training to good use, inflicting terror on the community via a string of r long range killings, against random victims; an an Ed Wood, Lugosi vibe is present in the depiction of a up and coming director, played by Peter Bogdanovich playing Himself,at the time, pretty much, as a film fan doing hackwork, He was, at the time, shooting B-pictures for Roger Corman..
The other part of the story, which weaves well with the main section, deals with an aging horror star (played wonderfully by Boris Karloff) who wants to retire because real life is now scary then any of his films.
Tight, suspenseful, full of cross-cutting scenes to follow the unfolding of two stories that are about to merge into one, TARGETS is the last major feature film that BORIS KARLOFF made, and it's one of his best during the latter part of his career.He's a man about to retire from the picture business, a horror film star called Byron Orlock, feeling he's too much of an anachronism in the changing world of the late '60s and that his kind of horror is passé.
On the very same day, legendary actor Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) is making his final promotional appearance before retiring from the business after a long career as a icon of horror movies.
These two monsters, the fictional and the real one will face each other when Bobby arrives at the Drive-In theater where Orlok will make his final appearance.Written by Bogdanovich and his then wife Polly Platt, the film is at its core a thriller with a Hitchcocknian style; however, it's not difficult to see that the movie is also a reflection of what the couple of writers thought about the dying decade.
On one hand, the story of Orlok feels definitely like Bogdanovich's ode to low-budget horror films, with the casting of Karloff as the icing of the cake.
This is such a great movie,just a classic all the way around.Great directing by Peter Bogdanovich,and marvelous acting from Boris Karloff and Tim O'Kelly.For sheer,straight-to-the point realism,Targets is hard to match.Everything about it is one of a kind,although it shouldn't be viewed with anti-gun sentiment.If anything,the viewer is left  with the obvious fact that,in the end, it's always people who kill people.By all means if you want to see a gem of a movie,than don't miss out on this one!
In one of the most daring displays of creative fortitude- and just one of the great movie-geek stories to tell- Peter Bogdanovich, an assistant for Roger Corman on the Wild Angels, was given carte blanche by Corman for his first film as director, with the only catch being that he had to use Boris Karloff for two days that he owed Corman, and had to use footage from the Victorian horror film the Terror.
After seeing the Terror, Bogdanovich joked to his wife how the film should start: the climax of the Terror is shown in a screening room where once the film ends Karloff sitting and watching the film turns around to Corman and says "that was the worst movie I've ever seen!" But then this, plus the story of Charles Whitman (you might remember his mention in Full Metal Jacket), spurred on a direction in two stories: the story of an old, cranky and waiting to retire horror movie star who thinks he's run his course, and a frighteningly ordinary kid from the suburbs who has a lot of guns and uses them first on his wife and mother, then on passer-bys on the highway.What Bogdanovich has here is a case of two stories that should be completely unlikely to work together- with the killer story being the one that should obviously be more compelling- but somehow logically work together.
TARGETS is a gripping and suspenseful piece of work that depicts the violent mess that civilization frequently seems in danger of becoming.Boris Karloff's "Byron Orlok" character has a definite social conscience; he is actually concerned about the effects that his actions (starring in horror movie "heavy" roles) have on society.The one fault I see in TARGETS is that Bobby goes on a killing spree for no apparent reason.
Byron Orlok is an aging film star, who has made his reputation in horror movies.Now he wants to retire, feeling that there is no place for an old-fashined actor like him.That you can't scare people so easily now, wearing a monster mask, when much worse things are going on outside.At the same time a young Vietnam veteran and an insurance agent, Bobby Thompson, buys weapons and starts shooting people.Peter Bogdanovich, who recently turned 70, is the director of Targets (1968).This started his career as a director, thanks to Roger Corman.The movie uses many clips from the Corman/Karloff collaboration The Terror (1963).The part of Orlok is played by one of the greatest actors of all time, Boris Karloff (1887-1969).Boris Karloff plays a character that reminds very much of Boris Karloff.He's a horror movie legend in this movie just like he was in real life.He is really something as this aging screen icon.There's one funny moment in this movie, when Karloff gets scared of his own mirror image.Tim O'Kelly is great as this psychopatic gunman.This actor hasn't done a movie since 1973, but obviously he had the talent.James Brown is his father Robert.Director Bogdanovich plays young director named Sammy Michaels, who has wrote a screenplay with Orlok in mind.Nancy Hsueh is Orlok's secretary.This is a somewhat realistic movie.You hear these stories all the time how some loners start shooting a bunch of people.There are some shocking scenes in the movie.First is when Bobby kills his wife and daughter.Then randomly shooting drivers in cars atop from a Los Angeles oil refinery.The ending is memorable, when the mad man is firing at the drive-in theater and Karloff goes and saves the day.A very good movie that makes you think..
Basically ageing horror movie star Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) has become bored with acting and feels that monsters he is playing are going out of fashion, so despite getting a new script that was written specifically for him he wants to retire, but friend Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) is insisting he keep going.
Bogdanovich did something unexpected: rather than simply working around the existing footage, he set his story in the modern-day, casting Karloff as aging horror star Byron Orlock, who is considering retiring from the movie business.