Directed by Peter Bogdanovich (1968)
If not for a sniper on a shooting spree, this thriller would have been a droll comedy about a grumpy horror actor ready to retire. There’s an endearing moment when a hungover Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) is startled by his own reflection in the mirror with an egads expression.
Boris Karloff was eighty-one-years old when he made this film, a year before his death. He doesn’t present sickly, but his movements are measured. He uses a cane, and it’s easy to see Karloff performing a thinly veiled version of himself as Byron Orlok, who sees the world as young, his movies outdated, and his more recent performances as parodies of his earlier, more potent, frightful roles.
Mid-film, Orlok delivers a dramatic monologue of M. Somerset Maugham’s Appointment in Samarra, about a servant’s appointment with death. Orlok gives a chilling and remarkable rendition, particularly amid pondering his own demise.
Overall, the pacing of the film is on the drowsy side, but Bogdonavich’s passion for movies and for Boris Karloff makes for a heartfelt film.
Bogdonavich plays an aspiring screenwriter, Sammy Michaels, eager to persuade Orlok to read a screenplay written specifically for him, which on a meta-level is most likely the scenario that occurred between the real Bogdonavich and Karloff. It’s easy to imagine the movie Targets as coming from the very screenplay Sammy Michaels is foisting on Orlok.
Roger Corman told first-time filmmaker Bogdonavich he could make any movie he wanted as long as it included Karloff. (Karloff owed Corman two days of shooting.) The Corman agreement for Bogdonavich must have also included a body count.
The final sequence is utterly terrifying, the sniper nested in the scaffolding behind the giant movie screen of a drive-in theater. This is during a retro screening of The Terror, an early Orlok/Karloff/Corman film. The tip of the rifle pokes out of the screen, small as a fly, adding a dimension of real-life terror to The Terror.
One could easily imagine Targets being pitched as a movie about a movie screen that shoots people, or a movie about an aging horror actor who ends up in a showdown with one of his earlier films popping shots at him!
It’s a chilling metaphor considering Karloff was a year shy of his own death and makes for a beautiful ending when he beats the sniper with his cane until the shooter is cowering like a little boy. Karloff says, “Is that what I was afraid of?”
The movie bombed when it was released, but remains ever prescient today with America’s mass shooting epidemic. It’s a scary truth that Bogdonavich might not have foreseen when making this film, but here we are where, the horrific potency of mass shootings persistently wanes within our culture, an abhorrence that refuses to be politically rectified.
Bogdonavich based the mass shooter on the Texas Tower Sniper (1966), Thomas Whitman, whose motivation for the shooting is thought by many caused by mental illness. Whitman’s autopsy revealed a pecan-shaped tumor in his brain.
However, the motivation for the shooter in Targets remains opaque. All we see is an aimless young man who seems bored with life, without religion or philosophy, except for smoking in the dark, sipping on some soda pop, and acquiring lots and lots of guns, rifles, and ammunition on his dad’s credit card, no questions asked. The sniper is nonchalant about shooting random people as a boy at a carnival clinking tin ducks with a BB gun.
Fast forward to shooter games today in high definition with surround sound, one wishes from out of the battleground of falling bodies Boris Karloff might suddenly appear, brandishing his cane, to put the whoop on any snipers in the making.
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