Targets

Peter Bogdanovich's first film, which brings two separate stories together at the end. The first line: Byron Orlok is an old horror star. He decides to retire, on the grounds that the films he makes frighten nobody any more because the real world is worse. The second: Bobby is a young, orderly, quiet man. He lives with his family and collects guns. One morning he gets up, kills his family, then climbs a storage tank by the road and shoots at passing cars. No reason is given, and the film does not look for one. The two lines cross at a drive-in. The production story is as interesting as the film. Roger Corman said Boris Karloff owed him two days of work and set Bogdanovich a condition: use Karloff in two days and make use of footage left over from an earlier film. Bogdanovich wrote the script to those limits. It opened in 1968, immediately after a run of assassinations in America, and that directly affected its distribution. An important debut for anyone who likes American independent cinema and films about the ordinariness of violence. Before you watch, know this: the sniper scenes are cold and unexplained, and the film means them that way.