Cheap Targets (DVD) (Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff) (Peter Bogdanovich) Price

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Customer Reviews of Targets

Ahead of Its Time
Peter Bogdanovich produced, directed, edited and wrote the screenplay to TARGETS. The film has a curious and dichotomous quality to it. On one hand Bogdanovich handled the sniper (a very clean-cut Tim O'Kelly) in a very real, threatening and unprecedented way for its time. O'Kelly looks so much like the all-American kid from next door that he is all the more frightening making the film very unsettling. O'Kelly munches on a sandwich and guzzles down soda in-between his targets. Moreover the sniper is ferreted out by a famous horror film idol (Boris Karloff) from the golden age of Hollywood. The confrontation comes at a drive-in theatre of all places in an unusual climax. The film is suspenseful and alluring. Once you start watching it you're hooked. Is there a message to this film? Perhaps there is. The finale is almost pure hokum, but perhaps that is the point. Leave the killings, the violence and horror up on the screen. Don't let it escape into the real world. Get your jollies at the movies then drive home and lead a normal life. Perhaps that was true 30 years ago.

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A Cult Film Classic and a Fitting Farewell from Karloff
When in 1968 Roger Corman had a few days' use of Boris Karloff and nothing on tap for him, he gave young screenwriter Peter Bogdanovich the chance to write a screenplay overnight and start directing it the next day. The unlikely, astonishing result was "Targets", a well-made film that is both a character study of aging, disillusioned horror-film star Byron Orlok (Karloff) and a cold documentary of a young man gone quietly insane who murders his family and holes up atop a petroleum storage tower by the highway and begins sniping drivers. Escaping after some time, he winds up hiding out at a drive-in theatre (remember them?) where, as it happens, Orlok is making his last appearance before retiring from acting. What happens then is what makes the two parallel themes of the film come together in a dramatic, satisfying way. Bogdanovich established his reputation with this film, which has attained deserved cult status. Boris Karloff, in his last American film role, delivers a warm, genuine, fully realized performance, almost playing himself, at his best when Orlok expresses his cynicism about the kind of work he does, when reciting the old folk tale "Death in Samarra", and in the film's last moments as he comes to a confrontation with the deranged young sniper. This is a marvelous film that in many significant ways outstripped the bigger-budget films released in the late 1960's, and is definitely worth viewing. END

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a grand exit (well cose to an exit)
corman wows here and reminds us that we really lost a very good director when he decided to devote all of his time to producing.
regardless, forget those last, depressing mexican horror quickies that karloff wheezed his poor dying self through. keep this as his bow. it's a nice summation of a glorious career.