Targets
| Targets | |
|---|---|
Original movie poster
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| Directed by | Peter Bogdanovich |
| Produced by | Roger Corman |
| Screenplay by | Peter Bogdanovich |
| Story by |
Polly Platt Peter Bogdanovich |
| Starring |
Boris Karloff Tim O'Kelly Peter Bogdanovich |
| Music by | Ronald Stein (from The Terror) |
| Cinematography | László Kovács |
| Edited by | Peter Bogdanovich |
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Production
company |
Saticoy Productions
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| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
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Release date
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Running time
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90 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $130,000 (estimated) |
Targets is a 1968 American thriller, written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich and filmed in color by László Kovács. about a Vietnam war veteran who goes on a killing spree. The film earned mostly positive reviews, and was the final screen appearance of Boris Karloff who played a semi-autobiographical role.
The story concerns a quiet, clean-cut young insurance agent and Vietnam War veteran named Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly) who murders his young wife, his mother and a grocery delivery boy at home, then goes on an afternoon shooting rampage from atop a San Fernando Valley oil storage tank. Several motorists and passengers are wounded or killed on the nearby freeway. When the police respond and start to close in on him, he flees and takes refuge in a Reseda drive-in theater where aging horror film icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) is about to make a final in-person promotional appearance before retiring from show business. Thompson, perched on the framing inside the screen tower, resumes his killing spree after sunset, randomly shooting theater patrons as they sit in their cars watching the film. In a climactic confrontation, the elderly Orlok slaps the murderer into submission. As the police take him away Thompson remarks with apparent satisfaction that he "hardly ever missed".
The character and actions of the killer are patterned after Charles Whitman, the University of Texas sniper. The character of Byron Orlok, named after Max Schreck's vampire Count Orlok in 1922's Nosferatu, was based on Karloff himself, with a fictional component of being embittered with the movie business and wanting to retire. The role was Karloff's last appearance in a major American film.
In the film's finale at a drive-in theater, Orlok – the old-fashioned, traditional screen monster who always obeyed the rules – confronts the new, realistic, nihilistic late-1960s "monster" in the shape of a clean-cut, unassuming multiple murderer.
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Wikipedia