This strange little film was released two years after the infamous 1966 Texas Tower massacre and is loosely based on those events, especially in regards to the psychology of the killer. Charles Whitman, as you may recall, brutally murdered both his mother and wife and then entered University of Texas Tower where he gunned down 14 more people. After ninety minutes of shooting, Whitman was himself killed by police officers.

In the film, however, the fictional killer's fate is intertwined with that of an aging horror movie actor named Byron Orlock, played by the legendary Boris Karloff. The story begins with Orlock retiring from the film business. While leaving the Los Angeles studio, the actor has his first unsuspecting brush with the killer: across the street at a gun store is Bobby, a young wholesome all-American kid. He's in the process purchasing a rifle, which he aims through the shop window, putting Orlock in his crosshairs. But this is not Bobby's time to kill.

For rest of the film- until the very last few scenes- we follow Orlock and Bobby in their separate trajectories. Orlock, an 'old school' European actor, feels like a dinosaur. What is the point of making horror movies, he wonders, when far more horrible things can be found in the morning newspaper? Orlock despairs at the deep alienation inherent in LA, with its inhuman concrete freeways and car lots. Because of this, Orlock plans to leave both the movie business and America.

Bobby's life is surprisingly average. He lives in a quiet suburban house with his parents and wife. We get the impression that Bobby's dad somehow dominates the whole setup, but not really in an oppressive way. Bobby has nothing specific to bitch about but the alienation of the environment must have gotten to him. 'His head is squirming like a toad', to quote a song from The Doors. Obsessively, he keeps stockpiling guns and ammunition.

Then one day, while his father is away at work, Bobby kills his mother and his wife as well as a kid delivering groceries. Afterwards he jumps into his little sports car- the trunk filled with armaments- and heads out for a tall oil storage drum that straddles the freeway. In a chilling scene, Bobby picks off passing motorists from his elevated sniper's nest on the drum. Here's the weird part: despite all of the carnage wreaked by Bobby, most of the freeway traffic keeps on moving in an orderly fashion, as though the private environment of a car's interior buffers any and all horrors from the outside. Finally, as police sirens wail, Bobby descends the drum and jumps back into his convertible.

As nighttime approaches Bobby rolls into a drive-in theatre, which happens to be showing the premiere of Orlock's last film. And as fate would have it, the aging actor is cajoled into attending this premiere prior to his final departure for London and quiet retirement. As Bobby finds a new sniper's nest behind the big screen, Orlock is about to be confronted with the horror that he's been instinctively trying to avoid . . .

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