No Country for Old Monsters

Targets (Peter Bogdanovich, 1968)

You've got to hand it to Roger Corman, he really loves to get his money's worth by recycling older films he's produced by editing them into his new stuff. This requirement brief was imposed upon the young up and coming wunderkind, Peter Bogdanovich, along with utilising two days worth of filming with Boris Karloff that was owed to Corman. The result is the highly impressive debut Targets (1968), a meta film unlike anything I've witnessed under the Corman umbrella.

Targets is a film with two seperate narratives running adjacent to one another which converge in the final act: the first story is Karloff in a self-referential role as Byron Orlok, an iconic horror actor who feels old and out of touch with the now; the other, is played by Tim O'Kelly as Bobby Thompson, a young and clean cut ordinary suburbanite that's the very embodiment of a wolf in sheep's clothing. These two characters represent a passing of the torch, if you will: the monsters that feared us in fiction with the real ones that exist in our modern society.

The character of Bobby Thompson takes obvious inspiration from the infamous Texas Tower Sniper Charles Whitman; to the extent that many of the details evident from his killing spree are disturbingly recreated in the film. In contrast, the elderly Byron Orlok's weariness of feeling like a dinosaur from a bygone era, "as an acclaimed dramatic actor, I can't compete with real life terror" is literally juxtaposed with Karloff's actual role in the film The Terror (1963), featuring a young and very grateful Jack Nicholson. You don't need a rocket science degree to work out Targets' message on fictional terror in film pales in comparison to the real life horrors in this world, but you can still appreciate it, though.

Much to the chagrin of cinephile's who turn their heads at B-movies, Targets is fundamentally a genre production, but it does crossover into their more acceptable film territory via Bogdanovich's serious treatment of the subject matter. He shares the writing credits with his wife at the time Polly Platt, but according to Bogdanovich, much of the screenplay was reworked and improved upon by his friend and fellow film maker Samuel Fuller, although he wanted to remain uncredited. Bogdanovich also has a supporting role as Sammy Michaels (Samuel Fuller's first and middle names being used as a thank you), a  young director attempting to persuade Orlok to accept a role for his film. Michaels serves as light relief throughout the film as he's the butt of Orlok's banter, but also a welcome break from Thompson's disturbing storyline.

Targets' dual storylines really do signify an oncoming change in both film and the real world. It comes about at a time when Sergio Corbucci's bleak and frozen western The Great Silence (1968) revealed that the age of the traditional hero was no more, while Charlton Heston cursed us all in front of a rusted and partially buried Statue of Liberty for squandering the future in Planet of the Apes (1968). Films would get more nihilistic and more reflective of the oncoming decade to come. 

No pun intended, but I would have claimed Targets as Karloff's The Shootist (1976) if it weren't for the Mexican films that hardly anyone seen from the aging horror icon. Despite being in poor health, he also starred alongside Christopher Lee and a green painted Barbara Steele in the so-so Curse of the Crimson Alter (1968) from the same year as Targets. Let's just say that Targets is Karloff's last real hurrah, though! Thanks to Peter Bogdanovich, a director who I never really bothered with until the other week, and only really knew from his acting role as Lorraine Bracco's shrink in The Sopranos (1999 - 2007).

A personal observation I noticed were some similarities with Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood (2019). Two storylines set in L.A and the same period running parallel to one another in the film; one, a tale of a screen actor's relevancy; the other, an actual real life atrocity. If that's just a harmless coincindence, then how about the weaving in and out of traffic driving scenes with the same DJ waffling over his music playlist? Thankfully, Targets is a much better film and has the common courtesy to run at an acceptable film length and not an arse-numbingly two hours and forty-one minutes.