Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Targets is a pointless but engaging thriller, that is a mixed mess.So the film started off in another film and I had no idea what film I was watching or what it was about, so that was pretty cool. Every review raves about Karloff, I'm suppose to care who that is am I? I know he was in "Frankenstein". Anyway, he was fine, though the bit at the end where he walks up to the killer and slaps him is laughable. So Bobby says to his wife "You don't think I can do anything do you" and that is all we learn about why he goes off killing people. Byron says "Nobody cares about a painted monster anymore" and points to his newspaper about a shooting, when there is real horror out there. There are two separate stories and then the two come together in a silly conclusion. One with depth that is uneventful and the other eventful without any depth, you put the two together and you get? I don't know, an unwritten character that takes up half the screen-time. It's not a great film nor is it a bad film, it was fine.

Targets(1968)Targets tells the unsettling story of a young man who has gone amok and proceeds to kill any person in sight and how its parallels with the life of a faded horror star. I have to give it to Bogdanovich, he is probably the one of few directors that either gives you great hits or ultimate misses. I have brushed a lot of his film thru and watched it and every time he makes this kind of disasters you wonder if it is the same director that made those greater films. So let us just say that it has every thing expected from his worst features. A pedigree for very questionable performances (beginning with his very own performance), off-putting heavy-handed storytelling that tries too hard too include too many things at once and an amateurish camera work to be edgy (which I will give him a pass in this film since this is a B film after all). In the end, I just could not get the hype of it. I get that it tries to be deep and meaningful but its just did not gave me that spark. It is just too inconsistent in tone and try-hard script-wise. It sure has its moments but in the end it would be remembered by Karloff film where he plays himself. Nothing more and nothing less.

"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.

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. While this is going on a young man (Tim O'Kelly) from a normal family suffers a break down, packs up his guns and goes on a shooting spree. TARGETS has been called a love story to Karloff, a propaganda piece about gun control and various other things but there's no question that the film contains a terrific jolt that certainly grabs one by the throat and doesn't let go. The first two-thirds of the film are pretty much separate films as we bounce back and forth between the stories before the two finally meet at the end. Both sections of the story are terrific because they're so well made, raw and honest. If you're a fan of Karloff it's great fun seeing him playing someone who is basically himself. You can imagine him being unhappy with films like THE TERROR so seeing him react to a screening of it was fun as was another sequence where he's watching THE CRIMINAL CODE on television. There are several shots at low-budget horror films, which are pretty funny and one certainly feels like they're in the business because of all the behind the scenes stuff. The stuff dealing with the killer is also very strong stuff and intense as well. When he goes on the three killing sprees you can't help but hold your breath and even though the film is tame by today's standards you still get thrown for quite a jolt. The shootings are very raw, realistic and they come off extremely disturbing to watch. Bogdanovich does a masterful job with not only his direction of the material but the screenplay itself is quite good. It's certainly nothing ground breaking but it's the simple nature of it that makes it work so well made. The film really does have a documentary feel to it and this just adds to the creepiness of the material. Karloff's performance certainly ranks as one of the greatest of his career and it was the perfect way for him to end his career and one could only wish that this was his final picture but he went onto do some truly horrible Mexican films before his death. He has no problem playing himself but many actors say playing yourself is the hardest thing you could do. Karloff certainly fits the role perfectly and showed that he could still act when given the right material. O'Kelly gets very few lines but his quietness perfectly captures the killer mental state. The supporting cast fit their roles just fine as well. TARGETS might have meant to have been a cheap horror flick but thankfully the director decided to do something else instead. This is certainly a Roger Corman picture like no other and a film that contains a certain rawness that is hard to forget.