Targets

We rented this because we had just seen Easy Riders, Raging Bulls on video, and it was mentioned as Peter Bogdanovich’s first movie. It has an odd history. Roger Corman told Bogdanovich he could make a film but he had to use Boris Karloff because Karloff owed him two days’ work, and he had to use some stock footage from The Terror, an awful grinder from 1963 that starred Karloff and, looking very callow, Jack Nicholson. (Did you know Roger Corman has 353 producer credits at the IMDb? I wonder if anyone has ever produced so many—mostly awful—movies?) They combined it with an inspiration from Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper, and came up with Targets. It’s maybe a B+ movie. That means, its low-rent roots certainly show, but it is also clear that Bogdanovich had more going on than most of Corman’s crew. The ending is actually quite well done.