Targets ****½ (1968, Boris Karloff, Tim O’Kelly, Arthur Peterson, Monte Landis, Peter Bogdanovich) – Classic Movie Review 3874

Writer-director Peter Bogdanovich’s controversial 1968 film début hit hard in its day and still packs a punch, remaining a seriously relevant thriller. It promised a great future for Bogdanovich, which, for a while in the Seventies, he hugely enjoyed, with The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc and Paper Moon.

Bogdanovich also appears as an actor on screen as Sammy Michaels, a film buff movie director who persuades elderly horror-movie star Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) to make a personal appearance at a drive-in cinema showing one of his movies. This is actually Karloff himself in Roger Corman’s 1963 horror The Terror. Orlok is of course named after Max Schreck’s vampire Count Orlok in 1922’s Nosferatu.

Wanting to retire, an embittered Orlok feels that he has become an anachronism and that his films are tame compared with the real-life violence in the streets. Meanwhile, a quiet, clean-cut young insurance agent and Vietnam War veteran called Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) turns out to be a mad sniper.

He slays his young wife, his mother and a grocery delivery boy at home and home, and then goes on an afternoon killing spree and is shooting at people in cars driving on a freeway from the top of a San Fernando Valley oil storage tank, but he is eventually confronted by Orlok at the drive-in. The drive-in scenes were shot at the now-closed Reseda drive-in theatre in Reseda, California.

The killing spree was inspired by a sniper attack on 25 April 1965 when a 16-year-old alienated youth, named Michael Andrew Clark, shot at motorists from a hilltop along Highway 101 just south of Orcutt, California, killing three and injuring 10 others, before committing suicide.

With two of the participants – Karloff and Bogdanovich – more or less playing themselves, there is an interesting jumble of fact and fiction, myth and reality here. But Targets works best as a highly satisfactory, gripping low-budget B-movie thriller bringing the horror movie into real life.

Roger Corman executive produced, persuading Karloff to be involved through a deferred payment deal he made at the time of The Terror.

Corman had made a deal with Karloff for three days filming for a small fee plus a deferred payment of $15,000 if The Terror earned more than $150,000. In May 1966 Corman told Karloff it hadn’t but he would pay the $15,000 if Karloff worked on a new film – Targets, which extensively uses clips from The Terror. When he agreed to be in Targets, Karloff was finally paid his deferred fee.

In the end Karloff worked for a total of five days on the movie and refused pay for the shooting time over his contracted days. He’s on screen for about 30 minutes. The 80-year-old Karloff was in poor health with emphysema and rheumatoid arthritis, and was in a wheelchair with an oxygen mask on between takes. He had braces on both legs, and had difficulty standing or walking without a stick.

Corman told Bogdanovich he could make any film he wanted, as long as he used stock footage from The Terror and starred Karloff. The total shoot was 22 days.

It was seen by Paramount studio boss Robert Evans, who bought it for $150,000, giving Corman an instant profit before it was released. It was shot in late 1967 but released after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy in early 1968. So Paramount inserted a written prologue denouncing gun violence before releasing it.

There is no musical soundtrack apart from background music on a car radio. ‘Radio music supplied by Charles Greene and Brian Stone’ – Green Rocky Road, performed by their band The Daily Flash, The sets for Bobby’s home and for Orlok’s hotel room are the same painted and redressed. When Bobby writes out the cheque to buy the sniper rifle, he writes it out to Boris Karloff.

Also in the cast are James Brown, Sandy Baron, Nancy Hsueh, Arthur Peterson, Mary Jackson, Tanya Morgan, Monty [Monty] Landis, Stafford Morgan and Daniel Ades.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3874
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