I first saw this movie when I was fourteen, and I remembered liking it quite a bit then. I saw the DVD at my local Tower Records and expected it to be twenty-five dollars. To my surprise, it was ten dollars, so I grabbed it, hoping to God I would like it as much nine years later. I did.

The movie has several distinctions: First, it is the first film directed by Peter Bogdanovich, who went on to direct several important films in his era, second it is the last good movie Boris Karloff did during his lifetime, and third, it is the only film in recent memory to tell a two storylines about an actor who plays monsters and a real-life monster all in ninety-minute framework.

The film begins as horror movie star Byron Orlok (Karloff, playing himself more or less and doing it splendidly) announces his retirement because he thinks the real horror is out on the street. "No one's afraid of a painted monster." Meanwhile his secretary's boyfriend Sammy Michaels (writer/director Bogdanovich, filling in for a friend named George Morfogen) wants him to star in his new movie because he claims there's no one else who can do it.

From here, we switch to a completely different storyline based upon the Charles Whitman killings about a young man named Bobby Thompson (played by an actor named Tim O'Kelly, who looked curiously like a 1967 version of Matt Damon). Bobby is an all-American husband and son who lives with his wife and his parents. He seems like a fresh-faced, innocent guy, which is why it's so frightening when his habit of hunting with his old man leads to an increasingly-growing obsession with firearms which in turn leads to him killing his mother, his wife and a delivery boy and becoming a highway sniper.

At this point, you may be wondering what these two storylines have to do with each other. More than you think, actually. The climax occurs at the premiere of Orlok's last picture, where Bobby goes and acts as a sniper. When Orlok discovers this, his secretary is shot in the shoulder and he decides to face his fear, so he goes behind the movie screen, sees Bobby with his gun, disarms him with his cane and slaps him three times. As he watches the boy cry on the ground and Sammy joins him, he asks himself, "Is THAT what I was afraid of?"

Targets is absolutely brilliant. What makes the film this way is not only the way the script (ghostwritten by Bogdanovich's friend Samuel Fuller based upon Bogdanovich's original concept) balances itself between two storylines which seem to have nothing to do with each other and have them coincide with each other at the very end, but also the fact that it is near perfect and it was shot in five days on a Roger Corman-like low budget.

The performances are all good. Tim O'Kelly is frightening as Bobby because he has that way of switching from the most likable all-American apple pie dude you'd ever want to meet to a no conscience having mass-murderer. Nobody would ever accuse Peter Bogdanovich of being a great actor, but he's very good here as Sammy Michaels, probably because the role was an extension of himself, even though he says on the DVD it was written for a friend of his who couldn't do it. And then of course, there's Boris Karloff...

Poor old Boris, eighty years of age, emphysema-ridden, brace-ridden on both legs (if you look closely at the opening scene where he leaves the screening room, you could see how bow-legged he was at the time). You figure even in that condition, he could just walk through the role easily since it's just him playing more or less himself, right?

Wrong.

The reason it was not as easy as it would appear for Karloff to play an extention of himself as well as he did is because there are certain aspects of the Byron Orlok character that Bogdanovich came up with on his own, like his bitterness (Bogdanovich stated several times including on the new DVD that Boris was concerned about a scene where Byron spouts off about how he could never play a straight part decently anymore and how he's just a tired old man) and his willing to retire, which if you knew anything about Boris Karloff, you'd know this was totally untrue of him. But he pulled it off without a hitch and pulled through like a real trouper, according to Bogdanovich.

Some stories Bogdanovich tells:

The above mentioned story, Bogdanovich says Boris didn't want to say these things since the character was more or less him and obviously he didn't feel that way (or else why would he do a movie like Targets), so he said did he have to say that stuff, and Peter told him the more he said it, the more people would disagree.

There was a part shortly after that where Byron and Sammy fall asleep on the same bed and both of them drunk as a skunk. They wake up at noon the next day. Sammy looks at Byron and screams. The take was he was supposed to laugh but Peter couldn't do it. So finally Boris told Peter to come up with something else because, "You wrote it, you can also ignore it." So finally, Sammy does the double take and screams and Byron wakes up and says, "Have you gone mad?" Sammy says, "I was having a nightmare - I opened my eyes, the first thing I see is Byron Orlok!" Not amused, Byron ignores him and gets off the bed to answer the door. As he passes a mirror, Byron looks at himself, does Sammy's double take and screams himself! This was ad-libbed by Boris, and it's always been the favorite scene of mine in the picture because we all know how willing Boris Karloff was to make fun of himself (Arsenic and Old Lace springs to mind). Peter and Boris really worked well together.

Go get this. You owe it to yourself. It's just great. And Boris Karloff, straight or horror, was a wonderful actor so it was nice to know he passed away with at least one good movie within the last two decades of his life on his resume. God bless ya, Boris baby!

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age