Targets [reviewed by Lackey]

Targets 89 min., 1968
Directed by Peter Bogdonavich
My rating:
IMDB • Netflix

Who’s scarier: Boris Karloff as a monster or your homicidal next-door neighbor?

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Premise

Byron Orlok is an aged B-movie actor, waiting to fulfill one last professional obligation (a personal appearance at a drive-in) before retiring. Bobby Thompson is a Vietnam veteran and insurance agent with a rapidly declining grip on his sanity and a trunk full of automatic firearms.

Review

The story behind the making of Targets is almost quintessentially ’60s: Roger Corman gave actor and film journalist Peter Bogdanovich a chance to make a movie, with a few conditions. First, it had to come in under budget. Second, it had to use Boris Karloff but only for two days (because Karloff owed Corman two days’ work from an earlier production). Third, it had to incorporate footage from The Terror, a 1963 horror-thriller starring Karloff, Jack Nicholson and Dick Miller, and directed by Corman (and Nicholson, and Francis Ford Coppolla, and Jack Hill, and…). You know, the classic Corman setup.

The resulting film, Targets, came out at an interesting juncture in cultural history, at a time when the genre needed to reinvent itself to stay relevant. I’ve stated in the past that horror is often most effective when the audience can directly relate to and engage with it, and at the time Targets was made, the paltry horrors that Karloff, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price conjured up paled in comparison to the atrocities performed by Charles Whitman and Michael Clark. (As I said in my review of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer–a film that’s similar to Targets in many ways–the scariest things are the things that could happen to you.)

Bogdanovich uses Targets to comment on this directly; Orlok’s perceived irrelevance in the face of changing times is the primary reason for his retirement. I’m not sure to what extent we can call Orlok a thinly-veiled version of Karloff (who did a few more pictures after Targets, but was eventually forced to retire due to health concerns, some of which dated all the way back to his Universal Frankenstein days), but I don’t think it’s an unfair assumption to say that Karloff is essentially playing himself, and The Terror isn’t the only item in Karloff’s back-catalogue that gets presented as an Orlok oldie.

Bogdanovich (who co-wrote the screenplay with then-wife Polly Platt and an uncredited script doctor) resists the temptation to be too heavy-handed with the commentary, focusing chiefly on character development, particularly on relationships (Bobby Thompson and his doomed family; Orlok and his studio contacts and P.A.). The Bobby and Orlok storylines are very separate from each other, and while I did get impatient waiting for the plots to eventually merge, I’m not sure the film would have worked better if the lead-up to the drive-in sequence, where the two stories finally come together, had been accelerated.

I can say that while I was occasionally frustrated, I was never bored; even when things don’t seem to be moving forward fast enough, Orlok’s interactions with his assorted hangers-on are plenty amusing. The violent sequences are exceptionally effective and chilling, particularly one in which Thompson takes a position at an oil refinery and uses it to fire upon random cars on a nearby freeway. The final shoot-out at the drive-in could have been tightened up a bit. The final resolution will probably strike some modern audiences as a bit unsatisfying, but I personally loved it.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Karloff is at the center of things here; he’s excellent as usual, and the genial and affable Orlok is a side of him we rarely got to see. Tim O’Kelly is very good as Bobby Thompson–he’s almost the textbook case of the seemingly normal, calm, reserved and likeable boy-next-door who’s slowly coming apart at the seams…and realizes it. (If Arch Hall, Jr., had played Charlie Tibbs the way O’Kelly plays Thompson, The Sadist would have turned out a lot better.) The rest of the cast is solid enough–including Bogdanovich himself as the director of Orlok’s most recent film–although you do get the sense that none of the supporting cast are really stretching themselves here.

I don’t think that Targets works as well overall as it might, but it’s still worth a watch. The scary bits work well, it’s a vital document of a turbulent period of American history, and on top of everything else you get a great Karloff performance. Not bad for two days’ work.

Postscript–I had never heard of Targets before I read Jason Zinoman’s excellent book Shock Value, a terrific book about the new generation of horror filmmakers that emerged from the late ’60s to early ’70s and how they changed the genre. Thanks Jason!

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