cinema history class: targets

Session: Karloff in the Age of Aquarius, Week 4
Movie: Targets (1968)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
Mild-mannered Bobby Thompson is about to go hunting people. Embittered actor Byron Orlock is making one last appearance. Bobby and Byron are on a collision course  Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:

The interesting backstory here is that the film got made because Boris Karloff owed the studio two days of work. Bogdanovich was told that he could use Karloff for two days to make any movie he liked as long as he stayed under budget and used footage from the Karloff movie, The Terror. Bogdanovich built the Terror footage in as actual movies being shown within this movie, which otherwise had nothing to do with the earlier film's gothic setting.

Even though this was a  Boris Karloff movie, Karloff is really not the star. That honor goes to the relatively unknown Tim O'Kelly -- according to Wikipedia, this was his one major film appearance. And O'Kelly was good as the psychopathic murderer. The concern here is that there wasn't a whole lot of character development. We're really left without any kind of understanding of why Thompson snapped. I suppose a good argument can be made that such exposition isn;t needed. Arguably, the idea that this can be anyone is even more frightening. And yet, I would have preferred to have more understanding.

Karloff plays his role brilliantly. And after the denouement, I think we should be telling jokes about Karloff instead of Chuck Norris. But he just isn't the star here. Actually, it seems that the stories of Thompson Orlock are almost separate movies that finally come together at the end.

I have to wonder whether the Kennedy assassination, which was still a recent event, was at all influential in this film. The shootings are very different, but a couple of the shots did remind me of the footage of Kennedy getting killed. One shot even reminded me of the Zapruder film.

At any rate, the stars of this were good, but it could have benefitted from more fleshing out.

Ratings:

Me: 5
Christina: 8
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 7
Joe: 10*
Rich: 3
Sean: 3 out of 4

*Joe missed this week, so he didn't see the movie or get to rate it. I'm just assuming he would have given it a 10.