Film: "Targets" (1967).
Peter Bogdanovich was an American film critic of drive and ambition and wanted
to become a director, as his French counterparts Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol
had done. So he sweet-talked independent producer Roger Corman into backing
him in his first film, Targets, the story of a maniac who hides in a tower
overlooking the freeway and fires at random at those passing by. It's a B
picture with no other ambition than to make its mark and gain a foothold in
Tinseltown. It worked because Bogdanovich went on to make The Last Picture
Show, in which Ben Johnson and Cloris Leachman won Oscars.
What makes Targets different from similar movies is that it is
cross-fertilised with another genre - the horror flick. It takes place above an
old cinema - a flea-pit, in fact, in which the movies of a veteran actor
specialising in horror are shown. Boris Karloff played many such roles and
here he is cast as a spectator of one of his own movies - The Terror
(1963), which was directed by Roger Corman, the very man who gave Bogdanovich's
career a nudge. The Karloff/Corman connection lands Targets an extra
dimension. It's not just a routine maniac movie (though it works in those terms,
too), but in a sense a critic's reflections on genre movies. Behind a rather
prosaic thriller, Targets is not quite what you would expect and is all
the better for it.
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